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Hollinger Power Ranking....Utah Jazz ranked 12th WTF???

Sean said:
Now the problem with your point, Lunatic, is that you're assuming an 0-8 start comes under the scenario of a team playing the best eight teams in the NBA. That's unlikely. If a team is 0-8, they'll have lost to a sub-par teams along the way.
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It is using an extreme to make a point. Who you have played matters a lot more than W/L early in the season
 
LunaticWolf said:
Yes, they were ranked that high, as they had just come off a great winning streak. Have you even looked at the formula he uses? It heavily weighs how teams have played in the last 10 games, or later in the season, their last 25% of games.

Houston has also played the Lakers, the Hornets, and San Antonio, 3 near perfect teams.

Jazz have played a 6-4 Miami team, a 5-3 OKC, and a 6-3 Orlando.

Based on how teams have performed so far, Houston has had a much more difficult schedule than us.
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Which is why I find his formula faulty. Hollinger's rankings are consistently wrong throughout the season and they're consistently wrong at the end of the season.

His same rankings had Utah beating L.A. in six games when the playoffs started last season. He had the Suns going to the Finals and eventually the Cavs winning it.

So I don't care how much he defends his formula. Year in and year out, it's no more accurate than the human rankings. Hell, in some instances, it's less accurate.
 
LunaticWolf said:
It is using an extreme to make a point. Who you have played matters a lot more than W/L early in the season
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Which is ridiculous because trends are, whether we want to believe it or not, generally established early in the season. It's certainly not the established fact, but the reality is that any team that can go 4-0 on an eastern swing against playoff teams is probably going to win a lot of games. You don't see bad teams do that.

You do see, however, bad teams starting the year 2-6 with their only wins coming against bad teams.

If he doesn't have a large enough sample size to produce non-laughable rankings, then he should wait until January to release his crap.
 
Sean said:
Which is why I find his formula faulty. Hollinger's rankings are consistently wrong throughout the season and they're consistently wrong at the end of the season.

His same rankings had Utah beating L.A. in six games when the playoffs started last season. He had the Suns going to the Finals and eventually the Cavs winning it.

So I don't care how much he defends his formula. Year in and year out, it's no more accurate than the human rankings. Hell, in some instances, it's less accurate.
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You are seriously mixing past years.

Hollinger chose the Jazz to beat the Lakers in 07-08, which we arguably came very close to doing. After that, it was the Lakers winning both series.
 
LunaticWolf said:
You are seriously mixing past years.

Hollinger chose the Jazz to beat the Lakers in 07-08, which we arguably came very close to doing. After that, it was the Lakers winning both series.
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No. No I'm not.

https://insider.espn.go.com/nba/pla...?columnist=hollinger_john&page=PERDiem-100415

(1) L.A. Lakers vs. (5) Utah
Season series: 3-1 Los Angeles.
Odds say: Jazz 57.8%; Lakers 42.2%
Uh, somebody want to do me a favor and let me know who's suiting up for this one? Without knowing the participation plans of Andrew Bynum and Carlos Boozer, this is a difficult series to forecast, but we'll forge ahead anyway.
I mentioned above that the Jazz were going gangbusters before Andrei Kirilenko went down, and he should be back in top form by the time this series tips off -- that's a major advantage for Utah. The Jazz were scorching hot before he went out; despite a rocky finish, they landed with a better point differential than the Lakers for the season.
Meanwhile, L.A. isn't exactly roaring into the playoffs, at just 16-12 after the All-Star break. More depressing is the state of Kobe Bryant's game. He's injured pretty much everywhere right now, and as a Blazers source told me after Portland's win Sunday in L.A., "He's just off." Observation seems to support that point of view. Forget missing the clutch free throws; what about Nic Batum blocking his shot flat-footed?
Since the All-Star break, Bryant has lost nearly four points off his per-40-minute scoring average, even with the Lakers' other injuries seemingly increasing the need for his offense. His turnover rate is significantly higher, too, with nearly four miscues a game after the All-Star break.
Here's the most damning evidence that something is wrong with him physically. Bryant shot 85.4 percent from the line through the end of December. But after hurting his finger in early January, he's at 77.6 percent, which would shatter his career low for a full season.
That said, the matchups here are really problematic for Utah. L.A. won three of four in the regular season, partly because the Jazz don't have players who can reliably check Pau Gasol or Lamar Odom, and partly because the normally highly efficient Jazz offense had unusual difficulty scoring on L.A. The Jazz could have had a dream matchup if they'd won against Phoenix on Wednesday night; they're a combined 10-1 against the three other teams on that side of the draw. Instead, they have a hard slog against Denver and L.A., teams they beat only twice in eight tries.
All told, both teams have pretty convincing reasons to pick against them. I'll go with the Jazz here, but I can't say I feel real strongly about it.
Pick: Jazz in six
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Sean said:
Which is ridiculous because trends are, whether we want to believe it or not, generally established early in the season. It's certainly not the established fact, but the reality is that any team that can go 4-0 on an eastern swing against playoff teams is probably going to win a lot of games. You don't see bad teams do that.

You do see, however, bad teams starting the year 2-6 with their only wins coming against bad teams.

If he doesn't have a large enough sample size to produce non-laughable rankings, then he should wait until January to release his crap.
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The Clippers are 1-9 to start the season. Would you expect them to continue playing at a 1-9 level, when they have played Dallas, San Antonio, Portland, Denver, Utah, New Orleans, and San Antonio? If you can't get this, then I don't know what to say anymore.
 
LunaticWolf said:
That was posted before the playoffs even started when their were questions about the health of the Lakers. Memo was also still healthy.

By the time the series started, he picked the Lakers in 5.
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So you're saying at the beginning of the playoffs, he accurately predicted the Jazz over the Nuggets?
 
Why even bring up the Clippers? Their performance after the last 10 games is exactly what I'd expect from them. They're not a good team. They're not going to make the playoffs. They're probably going to finish toward the bottom of the league. Does that mean they're going to continue their .100 winning percentage? Of course not. But they're not going to improve much on it because they've shown, over that stretch, they're not a very good team.

So while they'll up their winning percentage to something in the 30s, it won't change the fact they'll still miss the playoffs and finish with a losing record.

Now on that same basic point, I can honestly say the Houston Rockets are not a better team than the Jazz. I say this not because I expect them to win only 25% of their games - their current winning percentage. I say this because over the course of their eight games, they've had a chance to prove at least once or twice they are capable of beating a playoff-caliber team and, like the Clippers, they haven't done that.

You can look at their schedule and expect them to play better when it evens out and they play lesser teams. I agree. But they're 2-6 and they're still winless against anyone with a decent record. That will have to change greatly for them to not only contend for a playoff spot, but to pass the Jazz in the real standings. At this time, I don't think that will happen. The Rockets do not look like a good team. They do not look better than Utah.

That is what I'm saying. Hollinger's numbers are flawed. They're even more flawed this early in the schedule because, as we can all agree, there is not a large enough sample. It just seems pointless to me to release these rankings when the formula is skewed because of the sample size. Especially when, overall, I still think his rankings are ****. So it's **** piled on ****, I guess.
 
LunaticWolf said:
That was posted before the playoffs even started when their were questions about the health of the Lakers. Memo was also still healthy.

By the time the series started, he picked the Lakers in 5.
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Of course it was posted prior to the playoffs starting! It was his predictions based on his formula.

For most of the second half of that season, Hollinger consistently had Utah ahead of the Lakers. Do you honestly believe the difference in that series was Okur? Because I don't.

His predictions called for Utah to win the series. He had been calling for that based on his formula for a month or two prior to the playoffs starting. I do not believe, with Okur, without Okur, the Jazz were better than L.A. at any point in 2009-2010.

But that's just one series. He picked the Cavs to win the title and they didn't even reach the conference finals! All this based on his formula.
 
Sean said:
Of course it was posted prior to the playoffs starting! It was his predictions based on his formula.

For most of the second half of that season, Hollinger consistently had Utah ahead of the Lakers. Do you honestly believe the difference in that series was Okur? Because I don't.

His predictions called for Utah to win the series. He had been calling for that based on his formula for a month or two prior to the playoffs starting. I do not believe, with Okur, without Okur, the Jazz were better than L.A. at any point in 2009-2010.

But that's just one series. He picked the Cavs to win the title and they didn't even reach the conference finals! All this based on his formula.
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Formulas don't account for star players quitting...
 
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