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 […]
The NBA season, like a Stockton-Malone pick-and-roll, always arrives on time. To prepare for the next 1,230 games (All-Star festivities excluded), we took each player’s projected Real Plus-Minus and wins above replacement, calculated a total for each team, and ran 10,000 simulations of the NBA schedule to divine likely records and championship odds. We’ve split […]
The NBA season, like a Stockton-Malone pick-and-roll, always arrives on time. To prepare for the next 1,230 games (All-Star festivities excluded), we took each player’s projected Real Plus-Minus and wins above replacement, calculated a total for each team, and ran 10,000 simulations of the NBA schedule to divine likely records and championship odds. We’ve split […]
