It was back in the early 1980s that TIG was searching for a system, any system, to pick winners in NBA games. After slogging around in the dark for a few years, he finally figured out a formula to predict the percentage of how often Team A would defeat Team B.

      The formula works like this: Let's say a team that wins 65 percent of its games is going against another team that wins 65 percent of the time. No brainer there: it's a 50/50 deal. Now what if a .650 team is playing a .500 team. Again, it's a no brainer. Team A will win 65 percent of the time. (One could make the argument that it would be slightly under .650. Why? Because if you subtract the .650 team's winning percentage from the league's overall winning percentage, that would mean the rest of the league's WP is just a touch under .500 and the team that is exactly at .500 is a tiny bit above the league average. Am I making sense? TIG has spent many hours trying to figure this conundrum out and has yet to reach an acceptable conclusion. Whether the favorite will have a WP of .650 or about .645 really doesn't matter all that much as the improvement in accuracy isn't worth the trouble in recalculating every team's WP. Sorry for the interruption. Let's get back on subject.)

      But what happens if a .650 team is playing a .400 team? We might jump to a conclusion and say that since the bad team is 100 points under .500, that the favorite should be 100 points better and will win 75 percent of the time. That makes sense but what if an .800 team is playing a .200 team? By the previous logic, the better team would win 110 percent of its games! NCD Heck, not even the Miami Heat could do that. So there has to be some sort of formula, and here it is. Let A equal one team's winning percentage and B equal the other. Clever, eh? The formula reads as: (A*(100-B))/ ((A*(100-B))+(B*(100-A)))

An alternate way to express that would be to let X=A*(100-B) and let Y=B*(100-A). Then Z=X/(X+Y). Z would then equal the predicted winning percentage of the matchup. More to come...(remember, this site is a work in progress.)

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