5 Comments

  1. Daniel

    Hey Daniel,
    nice work, I like this – especially they way of presentation through Google motion charts.

    I have two quick questions to Your method:
    – When You adjust efficiency for opponent strength – You take into account their YTD efficiency, or the one from the observed period?
    – In order to ‘smooth’ results (Yes, I know it’s moving average, still You see some one-game peaks) weren’t You thinking to use f.ex trimmed mean?

    Additionally – how frequently will You update it?
    + will it be possible to see also data for other teams – as presented above for MIA?

    • DanielM

      Thanks, Daniel

      I adjusted for opponent over the whole year (it’s the same opponent strength as in my team efficiency rankings). YTD wouldn’t take into account all of the data that we have.

      I’ve never dealt with a trimmed mean. How would that be implemented? I used 5 game moving average because people know how that works.

      I have the full data in a spreadsheet that’s easy to update; I’ll post the spreadsheet once I clean it up a bit. I don’t know how often I’ll update this, but once the spreadsheet is out there anybody can do it.

      • Daniel

        Hey Daniel,

        as for adjusting for strength of opponent – I meant to take level of opponent’s play not from whole season, but from shorter period, which better represents opponents strength during analyzed period.
        As we analyze teams during the season their level of play differentiates due to changes of roster, injuries, tanking, etc. so it’s important not to take whole data without f.ex weighting, etc.

        As for trimmed mean – I meant here to reject some % of ‘outlier’ observations from calculation of a mean, f.ex. if You analyze 5-game buckets, You can trim observations by 40%, which means that You don’t take into account 2 extreme observations (the highest and the lowest one). Personally I use trimmed means with a little bit higher no. of observations (at least 8).
        Still with 5 observations You can f.ex. put some treshold for maximum margin (f.ex. 20 points – which means that if one team will win by 40 points, You take into calculations only 20 points).

        • DanielM

          I don’t really like to adjust for only a segment of play in evaluating opposition, because:
          1. The computation requirements are complicated
          2. Sample size

          I will explore other methods of evaluating besides moving average.

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