bobinator said:
I guess I get not wanting to have complete scoring margin for sportsmanship purposes or whatever, but the cap should have been 20. If you get beat by 20 or 50, you got your ass kicked, but there's (usually) a big difference between losing by 10 and losing by 20.
I wish they'd have included what the rankings would have looked like going into the postseason last year, just so we can see a comparison.
Agreed that there should be a cap, but a cap of 10 just makes little sense in a sport where a bucket is worth 2-3 points.
A win by 2-3 points means you hit one more shot. Statistically insignificant compared to just winning.
A win by 4-5 points means you a team takes a final shot to win/tie it, misses, then fouls to try and get one more chance. Statistically insignificant compared to just winning.
A win by more than 10 points isn't factored higher than 10.
So "scoring margin" realistically comes into play if you win by 6, 7, 8, 9 or 10.
It's pointless.
You either have a simple option and allow it to go up in the 20s so you can get a real idea of the games where teams truly dominated the other team (14+ points), or have a more complicated but statistically sound option where the margin throughout the game is taken into account. If a team wins by 8 points but was only up by that margin or more for the final 30 seconds it isn't near as significant as a team winning by 8 points that led by double-digits since halftime.