Standings will be up later today but I thought I’d look and see how well fantasy stats predicted last nights games since that would replicate Head to Head league’s smaller sample size and one on one matchups . At first, it seems to me like the much smaller sample size would make it less reliable but then again the fact that all the stats were made with a single basketball takes out things like the issue of pace. Last night’s first game was 90-89 Atlanta over theT’Wolves but in fantasy stats the Wolves won 5-4 with (it was a 4-4 tie in leagues that don’t count turnovers). However, even though it predicted the outcome wrong it did guess that it would be a very close game and if Atlanta had hit one more free thow or the Wolves one less (the final score was 78.6 to 78.4) or Joe Johnson’s buzzer beater rimmed out it would have been correct. The other two games were not nearly as close as the Nuggets easily beat the Mavs and the Blazers dispatched the Heat and in those games the fantasy score came down 6-3 in favor of the winner, though the Blazers did lose turnovers so it becomes 4-3 in 8-cat leagues. So this extremely small sample size seems to indicate that fantasy stats are a pretty good way to see how good a team is since it predicted two of three games correctly and predicted the third would be very close, which it was, even if it chose a different victor. Quickly though I thought I’d see how many “fantasy worthy” performances each team had to see if the winning team had more contributers or was carried by a stud more often. I’m calling any performance “fantasy worthy” that has at least one of these things: 10+ points, 6+ rebounds, 4+ assists, 2+ threes, 2+ steals or 2+ blocks. The T’wovles had 6, though Telfair snuck by with exactly 4 assists, and the Hawks had nobody outside of their starting five contribute in any meaningful way. In the Nuggets-Mavs game Denver had 7 “fantasy worthy” performances, with Anthony Carter squeaking out 4 assists, and the Mavs had 6. In the Portland-Miami game the story was the same with the winning Blazers having 7 and the Heat losing with 6. As you can see in every instance the team with more “fantasy worthy” performances won the fantasy game, though this was not the case in terms of the actual basketball games which means it’s proably better have good contributions from everybody on your team rather than one player who just went off though that may not be as true in reality, I mean look at the Cleveland LeBrons. See you later today with the standings.
Dan
