dsulz: Nice post Max, I don’t mean to rag. But 48 wins? C’mon.  

The 48 wins IS from the beginning of the season, as are the 70 and 20 wins. The formula I used predicted 43 wins for the knicks this season (see the chart in the middle with the caption “words, lines, numbers and colors” for predictions for all seven teams this season). Would be a little lower after the loss last night.

If I take all the games since the carmelo trade and before last night’s debacle, I get about 43 wins again (not surprising since we haven’t been much better/worse since the trade).

I’m not sure what you’re saying though about teams continuing to win at the exact rate that they have in the past. The Knicks have been around .500. By that logic, they should follow a pattern of win/loss/win/loss/win/loss throughout the entire season. That hasn’t been the case. They’ve had two six game losing streaks along with a stretch of 13 wins in 14 games. Much of that variation had to do with the quality of their opponents. Before last night, the Knicks had a moderately favorable schedule (especially considering how they’ve fared in the past against their upcoming opponents).

That said, that advantage is only marginal. That’s why the formula only predicts 43 wins. The real reason they have a shot at the 5th seed was because Atlanta has a particularly difficult schedule against opponents that they have had real trouble with (as evidenced by their disaster against Miami last night).

Overall though, I think all this analysis, great as it is, is kind of beside the point. Past behavior is the best prediction of present behavior. We were two games over .500 pre-Carmelo. With Carmelo we have a .500 winning percentage. I see no reason to believe why we will do particularly better down the stretch. We have 14 games left. Using my first grade arithmetic skills we can see that if past winning % is a predictor of future winning % we will win 7 or 8 of our final remaining 14. Which will leave us with 42-43 wins.

You could also make the argument that we’ll finish worse because we’re playing a lot of shitty teams down the stretch and we’ve made a habit of losing to shitty teams since we got Melo.

Nice post Max, I don’t mean to rag. But 48 wins? C’mon.

John Kenney: @21 I wasn’t saying the players should tank or have that mindset. I’m saying that as a fan, when I think about the losses we’ve been having, while frustrating, they might help the team some in the long run, given we stay at least at the 7th seed.  

ha, this occurred to me in a different way the other day, which was that losing two to Indiana helped to ensure NJ misses the playoffs and cuts down the chances of Williams staying there a bit.

The Lakers project as a 44 win team vs. .500 or worse teams and a 65 win team vs. .500 or better teams.

Lakers:
overall: 60 wins
vs. .500 or worse: 44 wins
vs. better than .500: 65 wins

Heat:
overall: 59 wins
vs. .500 or worse: 47 wins
vs. better than .500: 62 wins

Kings:
overall: 26 wins
vs. .500 or worse: 23 wins
vs. better than .500: 26 wins

It’s possible that many teams play down to their competition, or that I shouldn’t be adjusting linearly for SOS, or that this four team sample is just skewed. In any case, you can see that although the projections all seem to favor the “vs. better than .500″ schedule, the difference between the Knicks’ projection and these others is still huge.

A more conservative estimate (though still not totally thorough) would involve me halving the effect of SOS

Lakers:
54 wins vs. .500 or below
59 vs. better than .500

Kings:
29 wins vs. .500 or below
24 vs. better than .500

Heat:
58 wins vs. .500 or below
56 wins better than .500

Knicks:

vs. 500 or worse: 26 wins
vs. better than .500: 63 wins

Miami and Chicago will be a lot tougher, IMO – I wouldn’t put much stock in the regular season results.

This is NOT to say that we wouldn’t be pretty heavy underdogs, I just think Orlando is more flawed than the others and could be riper for an upset.