Posted: 2021-01-11 17:42:05 (CT) [ 67 views ]
In March of 2020, and prior to the NBA lockdown, we at VMI made note of our power index increasing overall to some extremely high numbers. I made a purposeful decision to find out which part of our formula was causing those numbers to calculate quite high. Some of the power index numbers were reaching upward toward 150 and leaving a huge gap between their opponents for many of the team matchups.
Since reality in the NBA is normally not so wide and any team can lose on any given day, we chose to correct the issue and bring the formula into more of a reality based "pick the favorite" range.
As you may have read in our blog a few times, we are still looking at data so that we can achieve a better balance given all numbers related to winning and losing. When something seems out of place we study it and locate the reason and make a change that correccts the underlying cause.
That is certainly the case this year and we discovered an issue that arose due to the cancelled games beginning in March 2020. The power index number had to be brought back into alignment again this season.
You may have noticed that the power numbers are more in line with how we ended prior to the lockdown. Not knowing how long the lockdown was going to last we allowed the schedule to continue to create games. So games were being created behind the scenes, but no data was populating them. This has been causing the index numbers to get very high once again, so we have brought them back into line. We have now eliminated that issue, and we will be keeping an eye on the power index to be sure it is continuing to reflect the current data and the correct power of each team.
Please let me know if you see discrepancies, so that I may look into any other issues you may notice.
