Simplest NBA Playoff Model

The Simplest Playoff Model You’ll Never Beat

There's an ESPN competition where many well-respected sports statisticians try to predict the NBA playoffs.  This article was written by the winner of last year's competition.  He also goes into detail explaining the difficulties of predicting this year's playoffs.

Here is an excerpt where he explains the a very simple playoff model:

So case in point, I came up with this 2-step method for picking NBA Champions:  

1. If there are any teams within 5 games of the best record that have won a title within the past 5 years, pick the most recent.
2. Otherwise, pick the team with the best record. 

Following this method, you would correctly pick the eventual NBA Champion in 64.3% of years since the league moved to a 16-team playoff in 1984 (I call this my “5-by-5″ model).

Of course, thinking back, it seems like picking the winner is sometimes easy, as the league often has an obvious “best team” that is extremely unlikely to ever lose a 7 game series.  So perhaps the better question to ask is: How much do you gain by including the championship test in step 1? 

The answer is: a lot. Over the same period, the team with the league’s best record has won only 10/28 championships, or ~35%. So the 5-by-5 model almost doubles your hit rate.

 Great example of how simple models can result in great prediction accuracy.