Georgia Tech profs put heads together, pick an NBA champ
By Adena Andrews, NBA.com
Posted Apr 17 2009 6:43PM
The Playoffs are filled with talking heads. They're NBA veterans in nice suits, or hard-nosed reporters spending their lives in the locker rooms, all spewing opinions on who the next NBA champion migt be. Once in a while, they even turn out to be right.
What if there were some guys who were never in the league, though, and who never appeared on TV, and they turned out to be better analysts than your typical talking head?
And what if they could kick your butt in a game of Jeopardy, too?
Those guys are professors Joel Sokol, 37, Paul Kvam, 46, and George Nemhauser, 71, at the Georgia Institute of Technology's H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Together, the professors have invented an equation called the Logistic Regression Markov Chain (LRMC) that can predict the outcome of sporting tournaments. Using this highly complex mathematical equation, they can pick the NBA champion for the 2008-09 season without watching a game.
With the LRMC by their side, these group of mathletes claim to be better prognosticators than Charles Barkley, Gary Payton or any other talking-head analyst on the planet.
"I think we could take on Gary and the guys, when it comes to predictions," says Sokol, the mastermind behind the LRMC.
"We could give this talk about the LRMC to thousands of professors at universities who would love to hear the equation," says Kvam. "But most of them would probably say 'What are Cleveland Cavaliers and why are they playing Jazz in Utah?'"
The LRMC initially was designed to decide the champion of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. The professors were inspired by a last-second shot by Tennessee that knocked Tech out of the tournament in 2002.
Since that game, the LRMC has picked the correct NCAA tournament winner three out of five times, including this year, when North Carolina won. In addition to picking the champ, in 2008 the LRMC got all three of the final rounds correct, and it even got the NIT champion right, too.
"Everyone has this intuition just by looking at head-to-heads and blowouts for who is going to win," says Sokol. "All we are doing is making a more rigorous argument."
Because the professors seemed so sure in their equation, and did pretty well in the NCAAs, we decided to challenge them to see if they could predict the outcome of the NBA Playoffs.
They scoffed. They said they could do it in 20 minutes.
Which, when you think about it, easily beats hours of sports chatter from the talking-head analysts.
The professors took 16 years worth of NBA data from every team in the Playoffs and used that to determine the strength of each team and its ranking. The professors then picked random matches between teams from the past 16 years, took the outcomes and plugged them into a logistic-reasoning equation.
In the interest of keeping this from seeming like a college research paper, here are the results:
Eastern Conference(All games considered)
| 1. Cleveland | 1. Cleveland | 1. Cleveland | 1. Cleveland (Cavs beat LA Lakers in Finals) |
| 8. Detroit | |||
| 4. Atlanta | 4. Atlanta | ||
| 5. Miami | |||
| 3. Orlando | 3. Orlando | 2. Boston | |
| 6. Philadelphia | |||
| 2. Boston | 2. Boston | ||
| 7. Chicago |
(With Kevin Garnett)
| 1. Cleveland | 1. Cleveland | 1. Cleveland | 2. Boston (Celts beat LA Lakers in Finals) |
| 8. Detroit | |||
| 4. Atlanta | 4. Atlanta | ||
| 5. Miami | |||
| 3. Orlando | 3. Orlando | 2. Boston | |
| 6. Philadelphia | |||
| 2. Boston | 2. Boston | ||
| 7. Chicago |
(Without Kevin Garnett)
| 1. Cleveland | 1. Cleveland | 1. Cleveland | 1. Cleveland (Cavs beat LA Lakers in Finals) |
| 8. Detroit | |||
| 4. Atlanta | 4. Atlanta | ||
| 5. Miami | |||
| 3. Orlando | 3. Orlando | 3. Orlando | |
| 6. Philadelphia | |||
| 2. Boston | 2. Boston | ||
| 7. Chicago |
(All games considered)
| 1. LA Lakers | 1. LA Lakers | 1. LA Lakers | 1. LA Lakers (Lakers lose to Celts or Cavs in Finals) |
| 8. Utah | |||
| 4. Portland | 4. Portland | ||
| 5. Houston | |||
| 3. San Antonio | 3. San Antonio | 2. Denver* | |
| 6. Dallas | |||
| 2. Denver | 2. Denver | ||
| 7. New Orleans |
While the LRMC seems to be all-knowing, even the professors admit that it can't take into account things like injuries or other unforeseeables. If LeBron James suddenly comes up limping, or Dwyane Wade starts playing above his already lofty standards, lots can change.
Before Boston made the announcement about Kevin Garnett's knee, for example, the LRMC had the Celtics in the Eastern Conference finals. Without KG, the professors see an Eastern Conference finals between the Cavaliers and the Magic.
The LRMC doesn't always pick the top-seeded team. But this season, it couldn't deny that the Cavaliers are the best team in the league, picking them as the 2008-09 champions.
As for the talking heads? We'll be hearing more from them in the weeks ahead
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