« Reply #457 on: Yesterday at 10:41:41 PM »
Another excellent game by Jrue.
Yeah, who knew White was going to fall off a cliff? We've really needed Jrue's steady hand these past couple of games. Dude decided to step up at exactly the right time.
Didn't everyone know White was going to fall off a cliff? I mean White was always going to regress to the mean. That is how those things work.
There’s a space between clear All-Star and 2022 playoffs disaster. We thought he had moved past the latter. Hopefully it really is just a mini-slump and not indicative of something greater. We are who we are this season in large part to White elevating his game.
But luckily Jrue suddenly became a much better player just as White fell off. That has been huge. If both of them just ‘regress to the mean’, then we will be fine, as well
well when you play well above your level, you are invariably going to play well below it at some point, so that you end up where you should be
No, that isn't how probabilities or regression to the mean work. There isn't some cosmic force that will make you play the perfect level of bad to instantly balance out the good, it's far, far more likely to have a bunch slightly below average games than a couple of real stinkers.
But even that isn't guaranteed, players have (and will continue to) go on unreasonably long hot streaks without suddenly having equally long/extreme cold streaks. And ditto for cold streaks like Al's not meaning that he's going to start shooting 57% on threes in the next 2 rounds.
Sure, they don't HAVE TO have unreasonably cold streaks after a hot streak. But they sometimes will. Shooting game to game is basically a normal distribution around your true average. most games you'll be relatively close to your average but for stretches you'll be crazy good or crazy bad, the tails of the distribution.
Following a crazy outlier shooting stretch one direction with a crazy outlier shooting stretch the other will happen sometimes. This is one of those times.
I'm not even sure that is true. Take Curry in his best 3 point shooting season. He shot 45.4%, but here are the number of games and the percentage he shotnin them
60% or better - 11 games
> 50% to 60% - 10 games
Exactly 50% - 13 games
> 45.4 to 50% - 5 games
40-45.4% - 14 games
30-39.9% - 13 games
< 30% - 11 games
In other words, the greatest shooter ever in his best season was all over the map. And basically had as many downright terrible games as he did amazingly awesome games.
The example you just provided is basically a bell curve. Here's the # of games broken down by 5% intervals:
0-5: 0
5.01-10: 2
10.01-15: 1
15.01-20: 2
20.01-25: 6
25.01-30: 5
30.01-35: 6
35.01-40: 6
40.01-45: 12
45.01-50: 19
50.01-55: 4
55.01-60: 7
60.01-65: 3
65.01-70: 3
70.01-75: 4
75.01-80: 0
The meat of his attempts are around his seaosn of average of 45 +/- 5%, with expanding shoulders out to there shrinking down to very few occurrences at the extremes. IE: A bell curve.
A seaosn full of shooting attempts will always have numbers all over the place, they'll just be more occurrences generally close to a players average.
It is mostly flat with a real high peak in the middle. That isn't a typical bell curve, but is typical for sports i.e. sports will have a lot more extremes than regular probability even for the greatest shooter of all time. And yes even in sports the largest number of games will be closer to the average, after all there is a reason the guy averages that number.
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2023 Historical Draft - Brooklyn Nets - 9th pick
Bigs - Pau, Amar'e, Issel, McGinnis, Roundfield
Wings - Dantley, Bowen, J. Jackson
Guards - Cheeks, Petrovic, Buse, Rip