Sacramento comes to town Friday night seeking their first win of the season, while the Spurs seeks to stay awake long enough to make it three in a row. Seriously, starting the season with Portland, Memphis and Sacramento? That's three of the five most boring teams in the NBA, at least in my opinion. Minnesota and the Clippers being the other two.
I used to enjoy watching the Kings, mainly to marvel at the horrible defense of Mike Bibby and giggle at the possibility of Ron Artest biting someone's face. But Bibby's hurt and Artest is suspended, leaving me only to wonder how many horrible shots John Salmons will heave. They have no other player that interests me. Nope, there's nobody else relevant to me or this site. I don't know what you're talking about. Shut up.
Guess what? The game isn't on tv in Austin! Yay!
PtR member Jones had a good question about the contest:
The final score was SA 104, MEM 101. Bones missed SA's score by 2 points and MEM's score by 4. That's a total of 6. The same calculation for Jones' guess yields 8. Bones wins. But I've realized the simple formula used to this point has it's deficiencies.
Let's say the Spurs beat Sacramento tomorrow 120 to 100, with Person A guessing SA 124, SAC 104 and Person B guessing SA 124, SAC 96. They both missed by a total of 8 points, but Person A nailed the margin of victory while Person B missed it by 8 points. In this case Person A clearly made the better projection and should win.
But what if Person B guessed SA 123, SAC 97? Now they only missed by 7, one total point better than Person A. But Person A still did a better job at quantifying the difference between the two teams and deserves to win.
So what's a fair solution? A needlessly complicated formula, of course. Let me see.
The typical Spurs game this year will have a final score of about SA 100, OPP 93. Hmm. Pardon me while I spend some quality time with Excel.
ok. Here's what I got.
Each person who's guess contains the correct winning team will receive a NCQAPA (Needlessly Complicated Quantified Assessment of Predictive Ability) score based on the following formula:
NCQAPA = (Y/X)^(4*Pi) * Z
Y = MAX(P,Q)
P = WIN/LOSE
WIN = winning team's score
LOSE = losing team's score
Q = WINg/LOSEg
WINg = person's guess of winning team's score
LOSEg = person's guess of losing team's score
X = MIN(P,Q)
Z = ABS(WIN-WINg) + ABS(LOSE-LOSEg)
Whomever has the lowest NCQAPA for that game wins.
That should do it. The winners of the first two games are still the same, but the formula solves the problems of the two examples noted above.
(Yes, there's a part of me that wants to keep track of everyone's average NCQAPA for the season.)
Now if I could only quantify how much of a sad, sad dork I am...
Post away, uh huh, post away, uh huh uh huh.