Tuesday, February 28, 2006

All For One

So Oklahoma pulled off an astounding fourth straight one-point victory last night. This hasn’t been done before in the limited data I have. Three straight one-point wins has only been done once since the ‘99 season - two years ago by High Point. If you have followed this streak, you have seen some examples of how luck is a large factor in determining the outcome of close games. As a further demonstration, I pulled every occurrence of a team playing two consecutive one-point games in the last eight seasons. Here were the results:

Record   Times
 2-0       43
 1-1       84
 0-2       33

This works out almost the way a coin flip situation should. You’d expect 25% in each of the first and last bins and 50% in the middle one. Take 3 each from the 2-0 and 1-1 and put them in the 0-2 and that’s exactly what you would have. I don’t know what this proves, as the outcome of one-point games is not totally determined by luck - you’d expect talent to have some impact. It would be more instructive to look at cases where there is a big talent gap and see how the favorite fared in these games.

Line o’ the Night

                           FG    3pt  FT   Reb
                      Min  M-A   M-A  M-A  O-T   A F S TO BLK Pts
Paul Millsap           35  8-13  0-0  4-5  7-18  2 3 1  2  0   20
Result: Win. Louisiana Tech 74, Idaho 49.        

Lost in the hysteria over the scoring title is that Millsap is in a tough battle for his third consecutive rebounding crown with Hartford’s Kenny Adeleke. With this effort, it’s Millsap 13.069 rpg, Adeleke 13.037 rpg. Conference tournaments will decide this one.