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Intro by KnickerBlogger on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 3:09 pm | permalink | trackback | comments |
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Original Article: http://www.nba.com/sonics/news/bulls070201.html

All the same, Chicago has one big fan - ESPN Insider's John Hollinger. Hollinger's power rankings, which debuted last month, have the Bulls not only atop the Eastern Conference as of Feb. 1 but ahead of two West teams, the L.A. Lakers and Utah, with superior records.

Hollinger's rankings have quickly become a lightning rod for criticism, with the ranking of the Bulls a favorite target. Criticism has come even from within the APBRmetrics community.

"Hollinger's new power rankings will be great for Chicago," commented Dan Rosenbaum, a consultant for the Cleveland Cavaliers, on the APBRmetrics message board. "In a week when they lose three games in the fourth quarter because they can't score, but win the fourth game by 40 over some hapless opponent, they will be able to feel good because they are moving up in the Hollinger power rankings."

Rosenbaum was being partially facetious, but his contention - that the college hoops-style blowouts registered by the Bulls are given too much credit by Hollinger's method - is a common and perfectly reasonable one. While the power rankings account for strength of schedule and recent performance, they are at heart based on team point differential, with win-loss record and the size of individual victories completely ignored.

"This is much less a factor than you might think," Hollinger answered his critics in a FAQ on his rankings. "NBA coaches tend to play their best players most of the fourth quarter as long as the margin is under 20, and as a result, even for the best teams only a small portion of their games are so one-sided that the starters can spend the second half yukking it up on the bench.

"Phoenix is a good example — even with all the one-sided wins, Steve Nash is playing a career-high 35.7 minutes per game."

It's important to note that no OTTERs were hurt in this study.

KnickerBlogger said on February 1st, 2007 at 3:15 pm :

I find it interesting that the conclusion was the Bulls are likely to be better than their record indicates, but worse than their Pythagorean win% would have you believe. In a way this is what I expected. The blowouts should indeed count for wins, but the margin of victory could have easily been in the 20s instead of the 40s. Accounting for that would reduce their Pythag by a bit, which seems reasonable.

jh said on February 3rd, 2007 at 4:22 pm :

Where I have issue with Hollinger's take on the Bulls, is the Bulls have a poor road record & only have one quality win on the road in Miami, and that might be debatable. Also, the Bulls have played 5 more home than road games right now. The 5 top minute-men for the Bulls (Deng, Noce, Big Ben, Lil Ben & Kirk) have not missed too many games–a combined total of 6 games last I checked. So, maybe these factors need to be taken into account when "ranking" teams.