So I was at ESPN and looking at Zach Lowe who seems to be like the biggest name stat guy at least on ESPN for his analysis on the finals, and in the end he said something like: "LeBron has not lost when he's favored since 2011, so I think he'll win this time."
Sounds great, except LeBron has only been favored 2 out of 9 times before this finals. He lost in 2011 as the favorite, and won in 2013 for a record of 1-1. This isn't like some random guy on the Internet. This is supposed to be a well respected guy in the new wave of math-based analysis. He's obviously favored in all the Eastern conference games where he's been steamrolling opponents, and nobody seriously considers the Eastern conference to be a credible challenge to LeBron which is one thing people argue against him. Yes it's impressive to not choke against inferior competition but not choking against what's widely believed as vastly inferior competition is not exactly relevant in the finals.
I think this highlights why I don't take these guys seriously. It's not to say the new math-based approach doesn't work since there are things where it clearly works on, but in the end they're still relying on trickery to sound like they actually know something. In fact, this is probably below trickery since Lakers are heavy favorites going into this, and I consider this explanation as to why LeBron should win to be worse than 'because they're the better team', because at least it is pretty obvious to anyone that Lakers are the stronger team. The bogus statistics they dug up here actually says there's a 50/50 chance LeBron will win this finals, which is obviously a lot worse odds than any respectable analysis of the game would give.
Sounds great, except LeBron has only been favored 2 out of 9 times before this finals. He lost in 2011 as the favorite, and won in 2013 for a record of 1-1. This isn't like some random guy on the Internet. This is supposed to be a well respected guy in the new wave of math-based analysis. He's obviously favored in all the Eastern conference games where he's been steamrolling opponents, and nobody seriously considers the Eastern conference to be a credible challenge to LeBron which is one thing people argue against him. Yes it's impressive to not choke against inferior competition but not choking against what's widely believed as vastly inferior competition is not exactly relevant in the finals.
I think this highlights why I don't take these guys seriously. It's not to say the new math-based approach doesn't work since there are things where it clearly works on, but in the end they're still relying on trickery to sound like they actually know something. In fact, this is probably below trickery since Lakers are heavy favorites going into this, and I consider this explanation as to why LeBron should win to be worse than 'because they're the better team', because at least it is pretty obvious to anyone that Lakers are the stronger team. The bogus statistics they dug up here actually says there's a 50/50 chance LeBron will win this finals, which is obviously a lot worse odds than any respectable analysis of the game would give.
