hypothetical sports scenario: experts or video game?
PostPosted:Tue Apr 12, 2016 2:15 am
One thing I always thought is interesting is that sports fan have no shortage of argument about hypothetical scenarios. The current popular one is the 96 Bulls vs this year's Warriors, but surely if you follow sports at all you'd always hear stuff like that. Now of course there's no way to figure out who is right without a time machine, but every once a while I'd see someone try to simulate something in NBA 2K or whatever the equivalent game for your sports is, and then people would immediately dismiss that because it's a video game. From what I can tell, video games tend to sell because they're at least trying their best for an unbiased simulation of the real thing because people buy them based on the likeness to their real life counterpart. While you'd hardly say NBA 2K is an accurate physical model of basketball, at least it tries to distill it down to the physical skills or whatever. I mean, if you look at the so-called current advanced model they're almost all comparative based, as in if the average power level of an average NBA player is 15 then LeBron's power level, compared to those guy, is 35. Even if this system is totally flawless it has no way to account for cross era comparison since the power level of an average NBA player clearly has changed as the sports become more advanced.
I'm not saying just because someone run it in a game it must be true, but if you're going to disagree with it, I'd actually like to hear some argument that goes beyond the "Michael Jordan is totally unstoppable", and I don't even mean that's an invalid argument. That could be correct but if I want to hear that from so-called experts I can get that kind of awesome insight from literally anybody on the Internet. Speaking of which, the motivation for this thread is because people run on NBA 2K and got that the Warriors will most likely beat the Bulls 4-2, and that result seems fairly consistent with the pace of modern development, and I don't think that even assumes the Warriors can have specifically have a unique defense against someone like Rodman who can't score which is something the 96 Bulls cannot possibly know about (because that kind of defense would be illegal under illegal defense rules). It's quite consistent with the trend that mid range 2s (a significant part of Jordan's repetitore) is just not that useful in today's NBA, and that the triangle offense does appear to be a pretty bad offense by today's NBA standards.
Another interesting simulation I saw was the 'would college team XYZ beat the worst NBA team', and I think when they ran it, it's something like the worst NBA team (likely the 76ers) will win a 7 game series against the best college team currently or from any era you pick about 99% of the time, and that the best college team usually would go 1-81 in a regular season. It's actually worse if you take a team like say, Michael Jordan's North Carolina team, because while Michael Jordan is a 99, the rest of the guys on his team are guys that wouldn't even be replacement level players in today's NBA so they'd get crushed, and note that the best college team would still only have a few players that are even considered replacement level players in the NBA let alone being considered as a starter even on the worst NBA team.
I'm not saying just because someone run it in a game it must be true, but if you're going to disagree with it, I'd actually like to hear some argument that goes beyond the "Michael Jordan is totally unstoppable", and I don't even mean that's an invalid argument. That could be correct but if I want to hear that from so-called experts I can get that kind of awesome insight from literally anybody on the Internet. Speaking of which, the motivation for this thread is because people run on NBA 2K and got that the Warriors will most likely beat the Bulls 4-2, and that result seems fairly consistent with the pace of modern development, and I don't think that even assumes the Warriors can have specifically have a unique defense against someone like Rodman who can't score which is something the 96 Bulls cannot possibly know about (because that kind of defense would be illegal under illegal defense rules). It's quite consistent with the trend that mid range 2s (a significant part of Jordan's repetitore) is just not that useful in today's NBA, and that the triangle offense does appear to be a pretty bad offense by today's NBA standards.
Another interesting simulation I saw was the 'would college team XYZ beat the worst NBA team', and I think when they ran it, it's something like the worst NBA team (likely the 76ers) will win a 7 game series against the best college team currently or from any era you pick about 99% of the time, and that the best college team usually would go 1-81 in a regular season. It's actually worse if you take a team like say, Michael Jordan's North Carolina team, because while Michael Jordan is a 99, the rest of the guys on his team are guys that wouldn't even be replacement level players in today's NBA so they'd get crushed, and note that the best college team would still only have a few players that are even considered replacement level players in the NBA let alone being considered as a starter even on the worst NBA team.