Sports writing contains some of the most interesting and innovative application of statistical reasoning to help understand the game between the line. Stat heads help make sense of what constitutes an effective player in any number of sports. And they help to point out the absurd biases of misleading statistics and observations.
Here’s a excerpt from TrueHoop:
Along those lines, John Hollinger (Insider) notes: “One stat we’ve heard nonstop over the weekend is that 78.8 percent of teams that win Game 1 go on to win the series. That’s perhaps a less telling number than you might think. A great many of those series were one-sided, predictable affairs, so the advantage wasn’t ‘winning Game 1′ so much as it was ‘having a better team.’ The real differentiator is being up 2-0. Those teams are 192-12 in playoff history, whereas series that are tied 1-1 go to the winner of Game 3 75 percent of the time. Thus, it’s imperative for the Game 1 losers to come out of things with a split in Game 2, particularly the four road teams that lost their openers but could find themselves with home-court advantage for the pivotal third game.”
Why do I point it out? Because in looking at business operations and trying to discern patterns and trends, it’s very easy to zero in on a seemingly compelling set of relationships that ultimately have little real predictive value to your business.
