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Thursday, February 10, 2011
Momentum, shmomentum
One of my favorite articles I researched was in-game momentum. For you newbies, it’s worth a look. Pre-discussions here.
Anyway, Gabe looks at a bit longer-term momentum in hockey. If you are going to find momentum, it’s in a true team sport like hockey. Basically, what happens in the last 30 games doesn’t really add much. The most obvious reason is: sample size. Just about ANYTHING can happen in the last 10 games, that to use that as some sort of guage of momentum is crazy.
This is the same sort like everything else: everything we observe is a SAMPLE of something real. I talked about this in the other thread yesterday that even if you have all the launch parameters of a batted ball, that is still a sample. You need to infer what that means as to the talent of the player to create those launch characteristics. This is true of when someone throws a baseball at 95mph that that is still a sample.
The question on the table is always: how much luck is there in that sample? Or, how quickly does that observation stabilize? For something like fastball speed, it stabilizes pretty darn fast. For things like team win%, it does not stabilize quickly. (The hockey chart above says about half-a-season.)
Everything you witness has a certain amount of illusion. Remember that when you deal with data.
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