NBA FINALS PREVIEW, PART 3
Insanity, Thy Name is Basketball
This year’s playoffs give a whole new meaning to the term recency bias.
In Part 1, we talked about all the crazy things that happen in basketball that you don’t see in the box score. Part 2 analyzed the unlikely rise of the Dallas Mavericks.
Regular season basketball is too random to be a true indicator of playoff greatness.
First, Denver was the odds-on favorite. Then Minnesota destroyed their myth of invincibility. Then Dallas snuffed out the TWolves 15 minutes of fame. Now, it is the mighty 64-win Boston Celtics with their historically great advanced stats and point differentials.
When are people going to learn to overcome their recency bias and look for the factors that determine a champion?
Weak schedules, injuries, shooting variance, and a lack of time to prepare for an opponent can make a team look historically good during the regular season.
Anyone who analyzes basketball knows this, but the media is all about getting eyeballs and clicks to sell ads, so they invent narratives to suit their purposes.
