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I'll turn your question around, and ask what good is a game if the statistically superior side always won??

This is 1 part of the reason. Besides that; YOU CANNOT DRAW CONCLUSIONS FROM 1 GAME. That is the law of statistics. You don't have to be a genius to understand that you cannot draw conclusions if your sample size is 1.

People seem to forget this the moment they lose a game in which their team is better. Yes, the ratings tell you your team is better, that is what you think too right? So the ratings are more or less accurate, it would be strange if they showed the other team is better (overall, not just this game) while you know you have the stronger team right? That's why you post here.

Then the question becomes, why does the better team lose a game? That is easy to answer, the GE is made to be partially random, so the better team doesn't always win and your players don't have the same stats every single game. So by having a slightly better team, say you have 60% chance to win the game and the other team has 40% to win. The ratings reflect that. It's still possible the other team wins because that 40% happens too.

Last edited by Jeründerbar at 2/27/2015 4:30:09 AM

Playing easy has its drawback, it's not free gift of enthusiasm.

And that is reflected in the defensive and rebounding ratings.

YOU CANNOT DRAW CONCLUSIONS FROM 1 GAME. That is the law of statistics. You don't have to be a genius to understand that you cannot draw conclusions if your sample size is 1.

Well ok, smartypants, here's a thing for you: PG scoring rating on the away team is 98.6. It means on average his PGs should score 99 points on 100 shots. The PGs in that game combined for...6 points on 17 shots. Now since you are so fond of averages and you don't have to be a stat genius, or any kind of genius to understand this, that rating means that if they play this exact same game again th PG could score 47 points on 17 shots. Simple napkin math is your friend here.

Just for the sake of argument, if the PG scores 47 on 17 shots because, as you say, it's random and you can be above or below the average that's a 41 point swing and the guests win by 40 points. I suppose you're one of those who wouldn't be surprised if the same game with the same ratings ended 136-97? This is the kind of irrational thing about ratings as currently presented to us.

Now tell me you believe it is possible that a guy scores 6 one time and 47 the next with the exact same ratings or even better that you have a logical explanation for it and we can leave it at this. I say the ratings are misleading and somewhere you need something that makes sense and allows you to draw conclusions on a game.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 2/27/2015 5:51:59 AM

what good is a game if the statistically superior side always won??

No

My issue with this is different. I played this game this week (79191134), I deserved to lose and while watching the game I thought my defensive ratings would be horrific. Now look at the ratings and tell me if they represent a situation where the home team nearly blew out the guests despite 2 injuries.

I'll turn your question around, and ask what good are ratings for, if they don't describe remotely logically what has happened on the court??? Why do we even need them if they are not fit for their stated purpose (game manual)?

You have no guarantee of knowing what the ratings are before a game, especially shooting ratings, that's fine. However in the boxscore we need something to give us intelligible information based on the current GE not any old version of it. People shooting the lights out while having shooting ratings in the 50s makes no sense whatsoever. Teams not scoring efficiently despite massive differentials in offense-defense makes no sense. Ratings should just reflect the reality of what happened on the court.

I'm not asking that the better team on paper always wins. I'm asking that the ratings are meaningful and tailored on the current GM so that people can understand what made a difference in the results. This was my point from the first reply to Perpete.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 2/27/2015 5:36:09 AM

PG scoring rating on the away team is 98.6. It means on average his PGs should score 99 points on 100 shots. The PGs in that game combined for...6 points on 17 shots. Now since you are so fond of averages and you don't have to be a stat genius, or any kind of genius to understand this, that rating means that if they play this exact same game again th PG could score 47 points on 17 shots. Simple napkin math is your friend here.

That's not how statistic works, another important fact is that the past does not influence the future. If you flip a coin and it's tails, doesn't mean the next time it has to be heads or even have a higher chance because it needs to average out. You still have 50% chance to get heads, regardsless of what previous results are. So no, the PG's don't have to score 47 on 17 shots for the scoring rating to be true. Besides that, I don't you can adjust PP100 that way because of actual limitations on Points per shot. The ratings just say that if those PG's would play a statistically relevant number of games, say 1000, on average over all those games they'd score 98.6 PP100.

What would you want those ratings to display then? The actual PP100 of that game? What use is that, you can just calculate that yourself and it doesn't give you more information. The information you can gather from this is that on average the PG's should score 98.6 PP100, and because they only scored 6p on 17 you can conclude they had a bad offensive game, an outlying result. Since the PP100 is a decent number, you don't need to change anything. Now if the PP100 was much lower, you can conclude the performance of the PG's is bad because appearantly they are bad offensively, so you could try and change that.

If you don't think it's logical that a player that scores 98.6 PP100 on average has 1 game in which he scores 6p on 17, that's just how it is, good players can have bad games. Lebron James normally has a great PP100 but he has games in which he shoots badly too. Now if that player has 10 games in a row in which he shoots as bad as 6p on 17, then you can ask yourself what's wrong, because that is a much smaller chance than 1 guy having a bad shooting night.

Look I don't want to sound like a smartypants, so sorry for that, I genuinely want to explain basic statistics to you if you like. Just tell me what you don't understand and I'll try to elaborate.



Last edited by Jeründerbar at 2/27/2015 7:35:55 AM

That's not how statistic works

That's exactly like it works. You have data points above and below the average. It was clearly 27 points not 47 though. It doesn't change the point since with 27 it's still a blowout for the guests. Both 6 and 27 would be outliers around the mean of the exact same magnitude.

Besides that, I don't you can adjust PP100 that way because of actual limitations on Points per shot.

Are you saying that the ratings were not exactly indicative of performance? In that respect I agree, but it's not what the manual says.

What would you want those ratings to display then?

The sensible average calculated based on the numbers the GE will use in the simulation. Ratings are the result of analytical formulas and I believe that the 98.6 number is incorrect as it weighs skills like it correctly did with a slightly different GE.

It's no mystery that they fiddled with the GE in the last few seasons, so if they haven't changed how ratings are calculated (both team's and scoring) we're looking at incorrect numbers and people will continue to ask why the ratings do not reflect games and how they lost although they had better ratings. Conversely, it may happen that you know you've been dominated, then you look at the ratings and it seems you would had won the game 8 times out of 10.

you can conclude they had a bad offensive game, an outlying result.

An equally valid conclusion would be that the rating is incorrect and the player had a perfectly average game.

some meaningless random statistics produced as a byproduct of the randomly generated games

Ok so if ratings (team and scoring) are meaningless why even analyse a game through them? That's my point: either the ratings are reasonably correct and we can take them as an indication or we can't. It's ok if there is a margin of error and variance around the mean, but not to the point where you conclude that they are meaningless