Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Going Streaking

Moving on to other things. A few facts:

The Mavericks have had a tendency toward streaks this year. So far, they've had winning streaks of 13, 12, 8, 7, 1, and 1, which means that once they've won a game, on average they're going to win 7 in a row before they stop. Six times so far, they've won 6 games in a row. If the Mavericks look at the standings after any given game this season, on average they've won 4.3 in a row.

Dallas's overall record is better than any other team's home record. The last home game Dallas lost was Dec. 7; since then, they've only lost 3 games (all on the road, obviously) in almost 10 weeks.

Of Dallas's 9 losses, 7 came in two short stints: 4 losses in a seven-day span from Nov. 2-8, and 3 losses in an eight-day span from Dec. 4-11. Hopefully they won't hit one of those weeks in playoffs again this year.

Of course, as I write, Dallas is trailing Milwaukee (19-32, last place in the Central) by 13 at the half.

7 comments:

scoots said...

In case anyone missed it, Dirk came up with 9 points, 4 rebounds, and 3 assists in the fourth quarter to lead the big comeback win. He finished with 38/11/8.

Milwaukee's a bad team, but winning ugly's ok when you pull it off pretty much every night. Dallas now has their fourth 8-game winning streak of the season.

I love my team.

scoots said...

Wow: Pic from espn.com.

micah said...

Why do you doubt?!

scoots said...

Because Dirk isn't Michael Jordan.

To put things in perspective, Magic Johnson played alongside two other hall-of-famers (Worthy and Kareem), and they went to the finals *nine* times and won *five". And the most games they ever won in the regular season was 65.

micah said...

I didn't adequately convey the smirk on my face when asking. I wrote that after seeing you say that the mavs were down 16 and I had just seen the mavs get the win. I was very much doubting them myself. However, I fear the Suns and I think I'm scared of the Heat.

scoots said...

Oh, yeah –– I'm always scared to assume they'll come back from a deficit, although this year, holy cow, they've done it pretty consistently.

The Heat's situation just doesn't seem fair, does it? Riley takes a few weeks off, the Heat win a few games in a row. And, like they did last year, they can just coast through the season and hope to get hot in the playoffs. At least this year it looks like Detroit will be genuinely competitive, so they'll have to beat someone to get to the finals.

As for Dallas, it's almost scarier to see your team play this well, because it makes you even more worried that they'll blow it in the playoffs. But Dallas really did make it to the finals last year, which is the first time they've ever done that, so I think there's good reason to think we're looking at a different team than, say, 4 years ago when Steve Kerr killed them in the conference finals. These guys are legitimate, and I think they'll have their day.

Texpat said...

can you crunch the numbers and tell us how often teams w/ the best regular season record win the title?