Category Archives: East vs West

East vs. West Final Standings

2015 NBA Season, East vs West April 16, 2015 1 Comment

So the season has finally come to an end. (We made it!) While a number of solid West teams limped to the finish line, the conference still posted a record versus the East that fit right in with their dominance since 2000. Below is a look at their final few weeks versus the East, weeks where non-conference play was all but already wrapped up with only 12 games left:

And a look at each team’s record and conference splits (click to enlarge):

eastwest

And a few stats to measure this year’s non-conference battle with every season since 1971:

weststuff

The 2015 West moved down a bit since my last look at those last few statistics, fitting right in with a typical season since 2000, as mentioned earlier.

Right now, there’s too much left to be decided before taking a stab at what 2016 will look like. We have the playoffs to play out, which seems to lead to one injury that’ll decide a team’s fate. Then there’s the lottery to determine the draft order, which we know from the past can really move the needle. (Think Tim Duncan and a coin flip between which conference he’d wind up in.) And then the draft, free agency, and so on. THERE’S A LOT OF TIME LEFT BEFORE NEXT SEASON, but it should be fun to see if the East gets a boost over the next six months.

So that’s it for this year’s non-conference updates, but if there’s something I missed or you’re curious about feel free to leave a comment on here or over Twitter (my tweets should be on the right side of this blog).

I also plan to post some other silly season-ending stuff before the playoffs start, but until then enjoy the break between now and the postseason!

Advertisement

East vs. West Weeks 19-22: A BLOG POST

2015 NBA Season, East vs West March 30, 2015 1 Comment

Had some laptop problems as of late. My own doesn’t quite work anymore and I’m waiting on a good time to put down some $$$ to get a new one. Meanwhile, the one I’m borrowing is a frequent visitor to the blue screen of death so it’s pretty difficult to research and write anything since I’m constantly at risk of losing that work.

BUT, it looks like I’ll be able to write up a quick post before anything bad happens. I took a look at weeks 19 through 22, which was basically the month of March, updated some splits, and since we’re nearing the end of non-conference play I also looked at how close or far away the West is at breaking some records including ones set last season:

Look at how big that table is. We’ve come so far.

So the West has been pretty strong over the past five weeks, going 70-43. The current top eight teams in that conference fed off the worst ten teams in the East, going 23-8, but also winning a bunch of games against the top five by going 17-9. That’s a bit impressive when non-conference play this season (and probably every other) has typically consisted of the best of the West beating up on the worst of the East and vice versa while the top eight in the West versus the top five out East have played fairly even.

Check out some updated splits I made, separating the playoff teams and lottos out West and the top five out East from the mediocre ten. There were also splits for home-road and rest-B2Bs. COOL:

splits330

Though I probably should include point differentials when the season is over, the playoff teams out West look to be crushing East teams not located in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto, or Washington including a 63-7 record at home when they have at least one day of rest. Only one bottom-ten team out East has more than ten wins against the West, which is Boston at 12-18. That’s huge, really, as they’ve found themselves in the middle of the race for a sixth to eighth seed in the playoffs. Milwaukee, Miami, and Brooklyn, the sixth to eighth seeds right now, have 11, 12, and 13 wins against the West, respectively.

The best of the East have also beat up on the lottery squads out West, though Phoenix has played the East strong at 18-11. A little bit of cherry picking on their part, but that’s normal and not even that bad compared to past West teams who dominated the East but struggled versus the West. Among other instances, the 2001 Rockets went 25-5 against the East but missed out on the playoffs at 45-37.

As noted earlier, though, non-conference play is winding down with just 12 games over the next three weeks. Below is a look at some non-conference records I’ve looked at since 1971 and how the 2015 West stacks up against them with 97 percent of their games against the East already concluded. Stats I looked at were:

  • Point Differential: This is where 2014 separated itself from the rest of the 2000s and 2010s.
  • West PPG/East PPG: This kind of adjusts for high and low scoring games. A 70-60 victory may or may not be more dominant than 130-120. We can criss-cross eras a bit easier with this.
  • Win Percentage
  • Pythagorean Win Difference: The West’s real record is multiple games worse than their Pythagorean one. How weird is this?
  • Pythagorean Win% Difference: I don’t know. I was bored.

The 2015 West once had a margin of victory of over four against the East, but that shrunk. We’re still looking at a top-five mark, however:

pd

The 1998 East, guys. When looking at point differential percentage, it narrowly tops this year’s West:

pdpercent

The 2015 West’s win percentage isn’t too special, however. Which means, when taking margin of victory into account, their Pyth record is going to be a bit better.

winpercentage

The difference between the real and Pyth win percentage was 1.12 percent. Hardly notable compared to the biggest differences in a season, but still worth noting. Overall, it’s a five-win difference:

pythwinper pythdiff

But, while point differential can be fun to look at it can sometimes be misleading because of what happens during garbage time. Pft, like that’s ever stopped me from getting carried away. I mean…non-conference Pythagorean record…?!

Anyway, nice to see the laptop went a couple hours without bogging down. With some more luck there might be more #stuff posted.

East vs. West Week 15-18: FINALLY AN UPDATE

2015 NBA Season, East vs West March 3, 2015 Leave a comment

AFTER FOUR WEEKS OFF WE’RE BACK WITH AN UPDATE IN NON-CONFERENCE STANDINGS. My first draft was typed in all caps but I narrowed it down to one sentence. Over the four-week break from posting, I actually did post some statistics I calculated over all-star weekend regarding the two all-star games that you can find in the My Soup section.

Anyway, the East fared okay against the West just before and after the all-star break but also after the trade deadline. From weeks 15 through 18, they finished 27-34 but were 21-20 coming into last week if that makes sense. Many of those losses last week were close games, including Cleveland’s overtime loss to Houston on Sunday, and finished week 18 6-14.

Below is the updated week-by-week breakdown along with non-conference records from teams over the last four weeks.

week182

(Edit: If you compare the previous update to this one, there are slight changes in some weekly stats. I’m pretty sure I re-corrected the same errors I tried to fix in week 14, which was weird to say the least. Now, scoring margins and win totals all add up. Yay.)

So among other teams, Denver stunk, Houston played well, and Brooklyn has scored some wins that might not have been expected from them. They’re still doing that with a win last night over Golden State.

That’s all I have to say, though. WOW, GREAT ANALYSIS, but I don’t have much else to say as I have to post this ASAP and prepare for work way ahead of time than normal because SO MUCH SNOW.

Again, while I haven’t posted much at all on this here blog this season, I added some stats to the My Soup page. Otherwise, I’m writing at Nylon Calculus. In time I’ll add some different posts. I didn’t have time to post another Dream Team over all-star break like I originally planned, so I’ll save that for the season’s end. I already have a bunch of ideas for posts to write in the off-season.

As for the non-conference postings, I’ll include some more stuff next week than I did for this post. That shouldn’t be too hard since this week I just copied and pasted some statistics. Story of my writing lately, actually.

Enjoy the week.

East vs. West Week 14: The East is rolling, plus some splits

2015 NBA Season, East vs West February 2, 2015 Leave a comment

I thought I wouldn’t write any non-conference roundups until the all-star break, but check out Week 14. THE EAST. There were supposed to be 27 games, but two were postponed on Monday:

(Note: There were a couple errors in a master schedule I have in Excel. Correcting them led to some minor changes in this week’s table compared to others. Minor, but noticeable. Most notably, Week 3 changed from 12-7 to 11-8. Simple data entry mistake that I didn’t notice until now.)

Anyway, the East since Week 7 are 81-89 and last week went 14-11 last week against the West, arguably their best stretch of non-conference play this season. Some of that is a little misleading, though. Oklahoma City is clearly better than New York even though the Knicks gave the Thunder a loss that could be huge in the long run, and Phoenix was likely going to win against Chicago and Washington when both were on tail-ends of back-to-backs. I’m not saying the Suns are worse than those two teams, but rest matters and they had an advantage each game.

And I’ve been meaning to run some numbers that paint a better picture than just looking at overall wins and losses, real or Pythagorean, the latter statistic a little goofy when applied the way I’ve been using it in these posts. I mean, I like to think after 450 games there is a large enough sample size to determine just how good or bad each conference was, and it’s not like anything I do will answer all questions, but I played around with some East-West splits anyway.

So below is what I looked at. I find Oklahoma City inconsistent health-wise to the point I left them off all splits save for conference-wide ones. That sounds crazy but I separated the West into the top eight and bottom seven seeds, but the Thunder were so weird to me that I left them off both. Like, when healthy they’re a playoff team, so it’s not totally fair to put them in the bottom seven where I wanted to see how the best and worst of the East performs against the mehhhh section of the West. This all might sound ridiculous and I apologize. If I run similar splits at the end of the season I’ll include the Thunder. Or just remove the top 8 teams and see if anybody notices.

Cleveland was a close call also, but I included them. This is all controversial, probably. The power I have on my own blog is out of control sometimes:

dasidhasda

Surprise, surprise! Good teams beat up on bad ones! Specifically the West though. I think that proves how much more deep the conference is, though most of us already knew and love to complain about that. Sure, the top five in the East can hold up versus the best in the West with an emphasis on the Hawks, but the sixth to eight spots (and possibly ten by the end of the year) in the West are obviously stronger than the same East seeds.

It is nice that the East has a juggernaut in Atlanta, though, and maybe Cleveland in time, making the conference at least tolerable. I might’ve already said this in previous posts, but the second round in the East is going to be pretty damn fun.

Anyway, hope the splits were interesting. Below is a look at this week’s non-conference games:

week15

Three Nuggets and Lakers games for the East to feed off of as well as a 13-9 home-road advantage, and the East has some decent firepower overall. The top five teams play nine of the 22 games INCLUDING A GOLDEN STATE-ATLANTA MATCHUP. That’s probably the game of the week, but I’m writing this before I’ve done the Watchability Rankings so who knows.

Anyway, enjoy the week.

East vs. West Weeks 12 & 13: Atlanta and the East hold their own

2015 NBA Season, East vs West January 27, 2015 Comments: 3

After a two-week hiatus, Chicken Noodle Hoop is back with an East vs. West roundup. Since Week 11, 42 non-conference games went down and the East held their own by going 20-22, including 67-78 over the last six weeks. Not great, obviously, but not bad really, though the West ran 8.4 wins below their Pythagorean record.

Below are the updated standings through Sunday. After that I’ll do a quick summary of each conference over the last couple of weeks.

The West

  • The top nine teams (New Orleans replaced with Oklahoma City, since Anthony Davis missed some games) went 17-8 with a +5.28 point differential. They also had 12 road games, so the home-road games were split. The same teams against the top five East squads went 4-5 with a -4.22 point differential. San Antonio and Oklahoma City got the worst of it.
  • So that means the worst of the West was, well, bad. 5-12. This was the weirdest stretch of the season from New Orleans, losing to New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. There’s no way that doesn’t haunt them when looking back on how they didn’t make the playoffs this season.

The East

  • Atlanta is obviously hot, SO HOT RIGHT NOW, but Cleveland looks much better than what we’ve previously seen from them. LeBron James looks like his old self. So, too, does J.R. Smith. This piece about his threes was nice. The top five East teams went 10-5 against the West, and as mentioned above performed well against the best of the West.
  • Boston survived a road trip out West, which was surprising to see from the post-2013 Celtics. The post-Rajon Rondo squad right now is, um, interesting? Two crazy wins against Denver and Portland, plus a chance to upset the Clips. They even rate well in my Watchability Rankings, though they’re declining in that metric.
  • Kevin Garnett stuck on the declining Nets bums me out every day, though this writeup about his career was fantastic. The Nets got washed against the West, outscored by 106 points and finishing 1-4. Atlanta can take Brooklyn’s first round pick if they choose, so this could be a monstrous year for the Hawks in more ways than one.
  • In the rest of the mediocre East, Miami went 2-2 (HASSANITY) while Milwaukee, Indiana, Orlando, and Charlotte went a combined 1-6. Ew. Luckily New York and Philadelphia picked on an Anthony Davis-less Pelicans squad that still should’ve been fine against the most heavily-armed tanks in the league.

Overall, the record-setting point differential has disappeared and the worst-half of the West still has plenty of non-conference games remaining. Below is a look at what games are left to play with top eight seeds shaded:

gams

Atlanta, the team that saved the East from disaster?

The West teams still have an uneven distribution of East games remaining, though maybe this is typical because of geography. Teams furthest out West are are among the ones with most and least non-conference games, which obviously includes Golden State, undefeated against the East with a mammoth game against Atlanta on February 6. WEEEEEEEEEEEE!

57 non-conference games will be played out from, well, yesterday to the all-star break with the West 2-1 so far. I probably won’t update this until that mid-season break since there are a bunch of other posts I’m trying to write up.

%d bloggers like this: