Pre-Season Basketball Ratings are a Hoax 10/23/2022

 In the past few years, I have analyzed the St. Louis area's Boys and Girls conferences with predictions on their records for the upcoming year.  Sorry Folks, NOT THIS YEAR.  And I will tell you why.

If you have followed my past buckets ratings for Boys and Girls, I have rated every team in every Missouri State HS League class.  No one in their right mind does this.  And if you kept track of my championship season predictions, I was able to predict, based on my ratings, about 83% of all games from district to sectional to the state tournament.  83% of ALL GAMES in all classes.  So I feel real good about the algorithm I used to rate teams during the season.



But my track record for predicting season records for the St. Louis Area teams was only so-so.  I had this high-falluting formula with return scoring, Value Point System (VPS), and scoring differential but it only predicted about 60% of the actual winning percentage for last year's teams.  

So what does actually do the best job of predicting a team's record, you ask?  The best predictor of team record is the team's scoring differential as expressed by Pythagorean Equation.  WHAT? WHAT THE HECK IS PYTHAGOREAN EQUATION?

Pythagoreus equation is basically this:


 You can actually read more about it HERE.  For the NBA, they use an exponent of 13 but I have found that an exponent of 6.4 is more appropriate for high school teams.

Now, what does all this mean?  Well, simply, defense wins games.  Let me say that again, 

                                       DEFENSE WINS GAMES

You can score all you want but if you don't make stops on the defensive end, you lose.  And using this formula during the season will predict about 95% of the records of teams.  That is a whole lot better than 60% using some fancy formula.

So the bottom line is, don't make pre-season picks with a fancy formula because they are no better than the Yahoos who are pulling pre-season picks out of their butt.  Oh, I tried several different scenarios with Pythagorean winning percentages in past years.  I tried a two-year average, a three-year average, a five-year average, and a ten-year average to predict the next year's winning percentage.  NOPE, the best indicator of the season-end record of any boys or girls team is their scoring differential after five or ten games.  

For those of you who like statistics, here is what that analysis looked like:


So please be patient.  I will start rating boys' and girls' teams in mid-December.  In the meantime, enjoy those bogus pre-season ratings and get ready for another exciting season of high school basketball.


If your local team was not included, it may be because they do a poor job of feeding statistics to the Post-Dispatch.  They either do not report any data, or they report partial data and it is hard to analyze.  If your school is on the list below, tell the school to get their act together and report the kids' stats.  They work hard and they deserve to see their hard work in the paper.
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Note:  Father Tolton has sent me past data even though they don't report all their games to the P-D.


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