Randomness

Just a random aside for everyone. One of my coworkers told me about this guy Leonard Mlodinow who was on NPR this morning. He was talking about sports and his book on how randomness rules our lives. I googled his name and found this quote from an article he wrote for the NY Post:

"Mathematics tells us that in a best-of-seven series the inferior team will win about four times out of ten. The odds of the better team winning improve if we lengthen the series. Still, in this example, for the weaker team to be crowned champion 5 percent or less of the time (the standard for "statistical insignificance") a championship series would have to be 269 games long."

Basically he's saying that 40% of the time, an inferior team will win a playoff series.

Imagine an NBA finals that went all summer in order to determine the ultimate champion. Imagine the NBA regular season turned into a giant round-robin tournament with all the teams playing each other multiple times in a bracket-like system, with a finals and semi-finals that went for 21 games instead of 7. Imagine if the bracket system started at the beginning of the year, too...the possibilities are endless.