In two days, we will find out who is the NBA MVP: James Harden, Kawhi Leonard, and Russell Westbrook. Each player has their pros and cons, and have been heavily debated over the past month since the finalists have been listed. Despite Leonard leading the Spurs into the second best record in the league (61-21)…
Now that the Finals are upon us (finally!), let’s take a look back at the Markov Chain simulator that we built for this post-season, evaluate how we did, and take a look at the NBA Finals! Round 1… 7 for 8 There were no surprises in the first round of the NBA Playoffs. In…
In continuation of our Markov simulation of the NBA Playoffs, we take a look at the updated probabilities for each team remaining. In this article, we take a cursory look at each second round match up and see how the first round panned out compared to the probabilistic predictions. So Far So Good: All rounds…
With the NBA Playoffs set to get underway, we take a quick look at the probabilities for each team becoming the NBA Champions. Common consensus would place any combination of the five strongest teams: Golden State – Houston – San Antonio versus Cleveland – Boston. But the question is how likely? To answer that, we…
Only a few days delayed due to an impromptu trip to Ottawa and a swing through Sacramento to catch the Kings upend the Minnesota Timberwolves 106-103 last night, my pre-season predictions are finally available for your viewing pleasure. In this edition, we take a look at the rosters on opening day and compute their expected…
A simple method of visualizing NBA offenses and defenses is through the use of summary statistics. This gives us a look at the average offensive and defensive game for any given NBA team. For sports such as MLB, NFL, and NBA, this gives us a representative glimpse at a team’s ability to play. In other…
At the close of the Pelicans – Warriors game tonight, we witnessed the Warriors set the record for fastest team to 60 wins with a 125 – 107 rout in Oakland. With the Warriors moving to 60-6 for the season with 16 games to go, the 72-10 record seems very well within their grasp. However,…
In this article, we come back from a month hiatus and introduce a normalized rankings model for ranking every team in the NBA. By normalized ranking, we set all rankings to a score between zero and one, where one is a perfect ranking and zero is the worst possible ranking. To build the model we consider…
Over our two week hiatus from Squared2020.com, there were 52 NBA games played, bringing us to a third of the season completed. During this time, we finally saw the Golden State Warriors drop their first game of the season, managing to go 24 consecutive games before their first loss in Milwaukee on December 12th. We…
This past week, 53 NBA games were played. After Toronto sky-rocketed to the top of the Atlantic Division with a 3-0 run, they proceeded to go 1-3 over this week. Similarly, Oklahoma City went winless 0-2 after a 4-0 week and Cleveland posted an 0-3 run. San Antonio again went 3-1 to continue their sustained…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 