Monthly Archives: September 2012

The new win-probability algorithm has been activated and it’s time to look at the most improbable wins of last season. Going forward, I plan to have better tools around here so you can identify these games without having to wait five months after the season ends for me to write something on them. What follows […]

There’s been quite a bit of recent discussion on this blog on the topic of three-point shooting. (Here, here, here, here, and here.)  There are two key takeaways from these articles: First, that it’s really hard to predict a team’s three-point percentage for a game, even knowing how well they tend to shoot three-pointers, and […]

Forty years ago yesterday, the USSR beat the USA 51-50 in the 1972 Olympic gold medal game, handing the Americans their first loss in Olympic competition. From a global perspective, it’s the most famous basketball game ever played. The contest is notorious not only for the outcome, but for the series of game management errors […]

About three seasons ago I tried to develop some sort of algorithm to assess a team’s chance of winning at various points in the game. It was the middle of the NCAA tournament, and as favored teams were finding themselves in a deficit at some point during the game, it seemed like it would be […]