His system looks at scoring differential not wins and losses. The Heat have beaten up the bad teams they've played by a large margin.
Does anyone else actually agree with this system? In my opinion scoring differential doesn't mean too much in basketball.
I think in general scoring differential is more important than records in predictions, but obviously there are more factors involved.
I agree. But I think about all the times that a game is much different than the score says it was. Garbage time has got to skew the results.
What's curious, to me, is not that Hollinger uses point differential rather than W/L. It's that he chooses between the two rather than incorporating both.
From a statistical standpoint, the goal of his system should be "goodness of fit," meaning its ability to explain as much variation in championship success as possible.
And from that same standpoint, it HAS to be true that a model incorporating both W/L and differential will outperform a model using only one of those. It's very simple: the more information you use, the better your model. This will be true even if point differential is a much better predictor of who wins championships, as long as W/L contains some information that differential does not contain.