The records of the Lakers and elite teams analyzed

Posted on LakersGround.net on 1/08/07.

The Lakers won another quality win last night. The Lakers have a problem of beating the good teams and losing to bad teams. I thought it would be interesting to analyze how the Lakers, Jazz, Mavericks, Spurs and Suns are doing at winning at different levels of competition:
          Elite  Good   Avg    Poor   Bad
Jazz      0.714  0.500  0.667  0.800  0.750
Lakers    0.667  0.571  0.857  0.600  0.750
Mavericks 0.625  0.400  0.857  0.900  1.000
Spurs     0.429  0.400  0.571  1.000  0.833
Suns      0.000  0.800  1.000  0.923  1.000
Rockets   0.375  0.833  0.429  0.667  1.000

          Elite  Good   Avg    Poor   Bad
Jazz      5-2    2-2    6-3    8-2    3-1
Lakers    4-2    4-3    6-1    6-4    3-1
Mavericks 5-3    2-3    6-1    9-1    5-0
Spurs     3-4    2-3    4-3    10-0   5-1
Suns      0-6    4-1    6-0    12-1   3-0
Rockets   3-5    5-1    3-4    6-3    5-0
The Mavericks, Spurs and Suns only have one loss each against Poor and Bad teams, where as the Lakers have 5. If the Lakers had only one loss against Poor and Bad teams, they would have a NBA best 27-7 record. The Spurs are below .500 against both Elite and Good teams. The Suns have lost every game against Elite teams, but are stomping on the rest of the NBA.

The bad news is that the Lakers are hurting their post-season seeding by not taking care of business against the lesser teams in the NBA. The good news is (1) I would think that would be an easy area to improve on and (2) once the playoff starts, a teams records against Elite and Good teams is much more indicitive of how they are going to do and the Lakers have done well against those type of teams.

Definitions:
Elite: winning percentage >= .650
Good: winning percentage < .650 and >= .550
Average: winning percentage < .550 and >= .450
Poor: winning percentage < .450 and >= .350
Bad: winning percentage < .350