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Message: [QUOTE="JoePgh, post: 4086711, member: 1131"] With only a few days until the new season starts, we seem to be scrounging desperately for thread topics. It has reached the point where we are even talking about umlauts. The topic of this post falls in the category of "Rather obvious if you think about it", but I have reason to believe that not everybody is aware of it. So, as a public service, and to dissipate the BY boredom before the first game, I offer the following: Did you know that every single basketball game that has ever been played or will ever be played (under current scoring rules) will satisfy the following identity equation? Margin of victory = 2 * [Difference in field goals made] + 1 * [Difference in 3-point makes] + 1 * [Difference in free throw makes] This applies to EVERY game: men or women; pro, college, high school, or midget league; played in Europe, Asia, or America. To make it concrete with an example, let's use the Arizona game, which (as a poster has helpfully pointed out) occurred seven months ago. In that game, the statistics in the above identity were: FG's made: UConn 20-of-56, Arizona 20-of-50 3-pointers made: UConn 5-of-12, Arizona 7-of-19 FT's made: UConn 14-of-20, Arizona 22-of-31 So, plugging this data into the above equation, and showing differences in favor of Arizona as positive and differences in favor of UConn as negative, we have: Margin of victory = 2 * [20 - 20] + 1 * [7 - 5] + 1 * [22 - 14] = 0 + 2 + 8 = 10 ... which, miraculously, is AZ's margin of victory. In another thread, a poster said that my arithmetic must be erroneous because I only multiplied the difference in 3-point makes by 1 instead of 3. The reason for this is that 3-point makes are included in the total of FG's made, i.e., the 20 field goals for UConn include 5 3-pointers, and the 20 FG's made by Arizona include 7 3-pointers. So 2 of the 3 points scored on a 3-point basket are accounted for in the first term of the equation. Hence only the "extra" third point from a 3-point basket needs to be specifically calculated for 3-point field goals. Thus it is correct to multiply the difference in 3-point makes by 1 rather than 3. Note that shooting percentage has no bearing on this equation. Misses are disregarded entirely; only made shots count. Of course this is perfectly sensible, since missed shots have zero impact on the final score. Using this identity helps to identify what aspect of the game most strongly influenced the final score/result. In this case, the difference in free throw opportunities (NOT free throw percentage) accounts for 80% of AZ's margin of victory, which you might not suspect after just watching the game. As I said, this identity equation is fairly obvious when you think about it, but sometimes we react to a game without thinking about it, and we miss something in that process. [/QUOTE]

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