Re: Kingspeed is not happy with the team right now.
The difference between the 31-9 team at that point of the season and now, is that they cant finish games.
No. The difference is that they HAVEN'T finished their close games.
I know that, as sports fans, we love to ascribe deep and fundamental causes to changes in outcomes (i.e. losing close games rather than winning them), but in doing so it's easy to forget the significance of randomness in those same outcomes. If you take 30 coins and flip them 82 times, you will find that "streakiness" naturally occurs. After 40 flips, some coins would have landed on heads about 30 times, while others might have only 10. If we wanted to, we could make up stories based on these numbers, identifying the "contenders" and "pretenders" to the Great Coin Flipoff title at the end of the coin season. Some coins might demonstrate "mojo", landing heads on lucky bounces after initially landing on tails. Would any of this mojo, or streakiness, necessarily mean that the coins were weighted, or actually had any sort of significant differences between them at all? Of course not. Even though each coin, over thousands and thousands of flips, would end up with a ratio of around 50/50 heads vs. tails, in the short term it's a statistical certainty that there will be some ratios far removed from that.
Obviously, sports teams are not coins -- they don't have a perfect 50/50 chance of winning every night, and there ARE external influences. But it's naive to ignore the random elements of the game, or to believe that teams (even good teams) can consistently win super-close games without also losing some super-close games. At it's core, any individual basketball game is a random event, made up of many smaller random events. The better team doesn't always win. Streaks are virtually guaranteed, and don't always have a deep external cause. Mojo is mostly a myth.
