Power Rankings

The penultimate column in my rankings is the power ranking of the team, but what does that mean? It's a concept that's similar to the Bill James's log5 concept (explained more here) and results in an easy comparison of teams. A sample calculation is as follows:

Team A PR of 2

Team B PR of 1

in a neutral site game, Team A's chance of winning if 2/(2+1) = 67% of games.

similarly, Team B's chance of winning is 1/(2+1) = 33% of the time they will win.

Looking at these rankings it means that Orlando (2.82) will beat New Jersey(.26) about 91.5 % of the time (that seams high. How does New Jersey only have 12 wins? They were a little unlucky this season, but we'll get to that later). Using these power rankings it's possible to calculate the likelihood of any team beating any other team.