What makes for an exciting game? Sensational plays, sure. Some lead changes, absolutely. But there’s also a feeling you get when watching one — that the unexpected just keeps happening. But this is FiveThirtyEight, and intuitions won’t do! What if we found a way to quantify that feeling of surprise? What if we made the […]
What makes for an exciting game? Sensational plays, sure. Some lead changes, absolutely. But there’s also a feeling you get when watching one — that the unexpected just keeps happening. But this is FiveThirtyEight, and intuitions won’t do! What if we found a way to quantify that feeling of surprise? What if we made the […]
Can you summarize the NBA season in one chart? With 794 games, more than 152,000 possessions and some 372,000 plays, probably not, but we’ve given it a shot. What you see above is the 2014-15 season’s win probabilities, summarized. At any point in an NBA game, each team has a probability of winning based on […]
Can you summarize the NBA season in one chart? With 794 games, more than 152,000 possessions and some 372,000 plays, probably not, but we’ve given it a shot. What you see above is the 2014-15 season’s win probabilities, summarized. At any point in an NBA game, each team has a probability of winning based on […]
In the immediate aftermath of the New England Patriots’ 28-24 Super Bowl victory over the Seattle Seahawks Sunday night, we gave a preliminary measurement of how exciting the game was using what Brian Burke of Advanced Football Analytics calls the “Excitement Index.” This index tracks the cumulative change in win probability throughout a game, the […]
