CapitalistImperialistPig

Basketball is an arena where big talents tend to be identified early - sometimes before junior high school. Jeremy Lin was not exactly invisible in high school - he was High School Player of the year in California - but he was lightly recruited out of high school and was a star a Harvard, which, unfortunately, is a bit like being the best actor in Abilene. The NBA usually drafts enough college players to fill three leagues each year, but Lin wasn't one of them. He did manage to get on an NBA team, where he saw little action in his first season. After being waived a couple of times, he got on with the New York Knicks, where he once again occupied the far end of the bench. Until nine games ago, when he got his very first NBA start. Since that time, he and the previously hapless Knicks have exploded, winning eight of nine, and Lin has been putting up superstar numbers. I saw him play for the first time today (on television) and he once again played like a champ, scoring 28 point...

One evil effect of the computer is that now basketball commentators can lard their broadcasts with all sorts of statistics, including some pretty lame ones (JJ shot 36% from the three point line in the regular season, but so far in the playoffs he is only 1 of 9, for 11%).  While my son and I were watching the Bulls-Hawks game tonight, one of the announcers stated with apparent surprise that the team that went ahead 3 to 2 (games) in a seven games series had an 83% chance of winning the series. Should that surprise us?  If the teams are perfectly evenly matched, so that in the long run they should each win the same number of games, then the odds of winning an individual game are 50% for each team, and team with only 2 wins should have a win fraction of .50 x .50 = .25 and the favored team should only win 75% of the time.  My son pointed out, though, that if the 3:2 ratio of wins faithfully reflected the odds of winning an individual game, then...