Quote:
Originally Posted by iggymcfly
We've played 7 championship contending teams. 6 of those games were on the road and we went 2-5. One of the losses was by 1 in San Antonio and one was by 3 in Houston which suggests that if we'd had an equal home/road split in those games, we'd be right around .500. I don't see why record against West contenders is more meaningful than record against contenders overall, especially with such a small sample. Toronto's just as good as Portland and Houston. And even if you want to quibble on including Chicago, they certainly have an elite defense, so if your hypothesis is that we can't get it done against top defenses, then that performance is still a very useful data point there. And again, playing Chicago on the road is just as tough as playing a top West contender at home. Obviously, if you parse the numbers down enough, you can make them say whatever you want, but I haven't seen any evidence so far that the Mavs offense can't get it done against top teams.
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Only a statistician would say that losing to a team by 1-3 points means that we'd win games against them in the future, particularly when you compare the clutch statistics in each of those games and also take into account that even with a miniscule sample size, we're roughly as good at home as we are on the road. Milwaukee only lost to us by 2 in Dallas and are better at home than on the road. Does that mean that Milwaukee has a good chance of beating us in Milwaukee?
Also, I don't know how you can immediately group games together like playing in Chicago being equal to playing Memphis at home-- a team that is only 4-5 (.444) when playing there.