Thursday, May 31, 2012

Tangled in the Rigging: Defending the NBA Draft Lottery

The NBA conference finals brings with it one of the best sideshows in sports: the NBA draft lottery, in which 14 grown men stand around awkwardly for half an hour to figure out how a bunch of ping pong balls bounced. We*, the viewing audience, are treated to a half-hour special containing some 15 minutes of talking heads speculating wildly, 2 minutes of commisioner David Stern reading franchise names, and 5 minutes of awkward interviews with team representatives. Fascinating.

* - Maybe "we" is the wrong pronoun; I mean, I didn't watch it.

But while the presentation of the lottery may not be especially compelling, the lottery itself sure is. The lottery teams (i.e., those that miss the playoffs) are ranked in inverse order of record, with the worst teams receiving the best chances of a high pick. So the team with the worst record has a 25% chance of winning the lottery, the second-worst team has a 19.9% chance of winning the lottery, and so on down to the 14th-worst team (the last team out of the playoffs) who has a 0.5% chance of winning the lottery. The whole list of probabilities for this year's draft is available here.

Some have argued (with varying degrees of seriousness) that the lottery system is rigged*, and point to the fact that the worst team in the league hasn't won a lottery since the Orlando Magic won and picked Dwight Howard in 2004. But I want to stress this again, because it's important: the team with the highest probability will still lose the lottery (i.e., not get the first overall pick) 75% of the time.

Monday, May 7, 2012

...I mean, uh, ALBERT PUJOLS IS AWESOME AT BASEBALL

"That one's for you, Bryan." (via)

I typed up my most recent article, investigating the causes behind Albert Pujols' home run drought, with a growing sense of dread. Visions of Pujols homering in his first at bat Thursday night hung over my frantic analysis like some baseball bat of Damocles. I watched Thursday and Friday's games with bated breath.

Considering the power Pujols has displayed throughout his career, the fact that he made it until Sunday afternoon was as good as I could have hoped for. Plus, now I get to write an easy follow-up post whining about my miserable luck*.

After the home run, Keith Law tweeted that he couldn't wait for the whiplash-incuding speed with which the narrative on Pujols would change. As a free service to those busy producers of the talking head panel shows on ESPN, we here at The Feats of Strength wish to provide a general recipe for a ready-made Albert Pujols discussion.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

We're So Sorry, Uncle Albert

Albert Pujols would be very happy if we all just forgot about the last month of baseball.

Pujols signed a 10-year, $240M contract over the winter with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim*. The statistically-minded balked at the deal, which would pay him $30m in 2021, when Pujols will be 41 years old. Still, it wasn't hard to imagine that the deal could still be worthwhile, so long as Pujols crushed in the first half of the deal.

...Whoops. Pujols, projected by FanGraphs to hit 28 home runs this season, is still waiting for his first homer some 107 plate appearances into the season. That's the longest drought of the season, and naturally, everyone's asking, "What's wrong with The Machine?"