Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Sixers and Wages of Wins

The Wages of Wins post on the Sixers is up. Professor Berri kindly linked to my post from the other day which was posted in response to the same comment that led to his post. Go read the whole thing.

The short version: Igoudala, Dalembert, and Miller are the primary win producers for the Sixers, and they've basically maintained their production from last year. Reggie Evans has not done as well this year as last year, but he's still been above average. Evans' decrease in production has been offset by having Thaddeus Young replace Korver in the rotation and by the improvement of Willie Green from terrible to bad. So taken all together, the Sixers are doing almost as well right now as they were predicted to do by Wins Produced at the beginning of the season.

Anyway, Professor Berri says it better, so go read the article here.

Monday, March 31, 2008

No one saw this coming...but we did!

Apparently TrueHoop is going to be spending time this week covering the "surprising" Sixers.

I'm actually pretty excited to see what sort of information Henry digs up this week and shares with us, but I did want to take exception to one comment in his post from this morning.
A veteran Philadelphia beat writer just said to me that "if anyone tells you they saw this coming, they're lying."
I enjoy reading the Sixers coverage on-line every day at philly.com, so I don't want to come off as too critical of the "veteran beat writer." To the extent that he's saying that most pundits and experts predicted the Sixers to be bad this year, then he's certainly correct. That said, I think the idea that no one could have seen a .500 season coming is a bit absurd.

Last season, the Sixers were 26-21 after the Iverson trade and waiving Chris Webber. Considering the lack of roster turnover from last year to this year, a prediction of a .500 record seems like a perfectly reasonable prediction to have made for this season. And guess what? I actually did make that prediction at the start of the season.

Not good enough? Well, you could always have tried making a prediction based on some of the advanced stats that are hanging around the internet, like Win Score. Oh wait. I did that, too, and my WP48-based prediction was for the Sixers to be a slightly better than .500 team. That prediction was probably a tad optimistic (as Professor Berri pointed out in the comments to this post), but apparently not by too much.

So somehow I managed to come up with two completely independent methods for predicting the Sixers performance for the year, and they both give reasons for thinking that a .500 record for the Sixers was a perfectly reasonable prediction for this season.

Good thing no one saw this coming.

[Just to be clear, the Sixers are currently at 37-37 on the season.]