The other day I saw John Hollinger's article on ESPN.com where he called the Raptors the dark horse in the Eastern Conference and explained why Toronto is 4th overall in his power rankings despite having the league's 13th-best record. The Original Seven may remember that this is the same John Hollinger who agreed to be interviewed after he picked the Raptors to finish 9th in the East in his season preview.
It occured to me that now would be a good time to chat with Mr.Hollinger again. Fortunately Chris Black had the same thought and beat me to it, so I'll shamelessly live off his transcribing:
In
your latest article
, you have the Raptors pegged as one of the top "under-the-radar" storylines to watch down the stretch in the NBA, why is that? Is it because they've deviated so much from your pre-season prediction that had Toronto pegged at 40-42 (8th in the East)? Who or what has exceeded your expectations of this team?
“The reason I brought up the Raptors is because nobody else is. A lot of what I do is looking a the numbers and then frantically waving my hands to get people's attention when it appears there's something folks are missing.
This is certainly one of those cases – absolutely nobody thinks of them as a serious contender, but the numbers say they absolutely are.
In terms of their exceeding my preseason pick for them, the biggest thing is the point guards. I thought both Jose and T.J. would regress this year and revert closer to their 2005-06 numbers; instead each took another huge step forward, especially Jose.
There are other smaller effects -- Bosh has been even better than expected, and they've defended better than I had pegged -- but by far the biggest variance is the point guards.”
So before the season, they're fighting for the playoffs, now you have them pegged as the 4th best team in the league (based on your
power rankings
). You talk about margin of victory, but how much does strength of schedule play a part (the Raps have played a lot of awful teams lately)?
Also, the schedule has been very kind lately (i.e. a well-rested Raptors team facing a team that had just played the night before)... are these things taken into account, or is there just an assumption that those types of anomalies even out?
“The strength of schedule does come into play, as does home vs. road. Toronto's gets dinged for a weak recent schedule, but they've won by such overwhelming amounts that it more than offsets the penalty.
And for the season as a whole, Toronto's schedule strength is better than that of Detroit or Boston. As for the back-to-backs and injuries and what not – the assumption is that comes out in the wash, yes.”
Can you give a brief explanation on the methodology of your playoff odds ? 19% chance of Raptors making the Finals is getting a lot of people (ed. note: "a lot of people" = me) excited.
“The computer starts with each team's Hollinger Power Ranking and creates a random variance from it for all 30 teams. Then it plays out the rest of the schedule and the playoffs based on those ratings (using randomly generated numbers) and records how far everyone got.
The computer repeats this simulation 5,000 times every night, so last night when it ran it the Raptors made the Finals in about 950 of the cases. That probably seems high, but the team is playing extremely well right now ... if they maintain it their win-loss record will catch up a bit with the lofty odds they're being given. And if they don't, the odds will head back south.”
I looked back at the past 20 Eastern Conference champions a while back at came up with the following two trends:
