It's Like Arguing With A Creationist

This will be my step-by-step response to his response to my response to his response. This will be much shorter because his response to my response to his response did absolutely nothing to help him. In fact, he contradicted himself so nicely that it proved my point exactly. If you don't want to read the whole thing, scroll down to where he talks about the 1996 Bulls. He reiterates my point exactly, only he sums it up even nicer. I even bolded it like this. This will be the last of this argument. His writing is in sissy red. Mine is in black knight black.

In response, Mssr. David Steinberg (MDS) seems to have gotten angry and banged his fist on his keyboard semi-randomly for 6-7 hours. I can extract a few main criticisms from the written diarrhea: [Yes, I admit I am not as elegant a writer. Sometimes I spew verbal poop, although I would characterize it more as Type 2 sausage-shaped but lumpy, rather than diarrhea. That takes nothing away from the valid points I make, and his decision to point this out is an attempt to try to take the attention away from those valid points.]

1. You can't apply odds to sports.
2. Your argument implies that favored teams cannot be impressive. Since that's not true (see the 1996 Bulls or Tiger Woods for counterexamples), you're wrong.
3. Your assumptions that lead to 49.7% odds for the Lakers reaching the 2008 NBA finals are wrong.
4. Your joke about igniting the party wasn't funny.
[These were maybe half of the criticisms I made. He has just ignored the ones that he had no answer too.]

Response to criticism 1: Odds apply to sports. Period. This is why there's a spread when you bet on sports. The line adjusts the odds so that the both teams have 50% odds of beating the spread. Suppose there weren't spreads (implying both teams have a 50% chance of winning straight-up). I would make money by betting on the Lakers to beat the Clippers. I would be right more than 50% of the time. I would have a deeper understanding of reality than everyone else - like Neo! - and I would make lots of money.
[You can apply odds, of course, to anything you want. I can apply odds on whether I will write an Oscar-winning screenplay in my lifetime (2:1) or whether my butt will itch when I wake up tomorrow morning (2:1). My point that the pre-determined odds have no indication of who the better team is remains unaddressed, or the process by which these odds are determined.]

Basketball, and most sports besides track, are intricate and complicated. But you can approximate the chances of one team beating another based on the available information. [He never addresses my criticism of the "available information." Besides what I wrote in original points 1 and 2, the odds are shown to be wrong over 30% of the time! (really, I'm not making this up, see here.) (Thought: if MDS doesn't believe in odds, why aren't I betting against him all the time? I could steal those mega-bucks he's raking in from the credit-score ads on this side of his blog.) [You would never.]

A clarification: odds do not mean the outcome of a game is predetermined. On a given night, the underdog can beat the favorite. They can even outplay the favorite. Odds simply give an indication of how likely that is to occur. When the odds are long, it is more difficult for the underdog to pull it off. They need to play near perfectly to pull it off. They need to put in an impressive performance to pull it off. The longer the odds, the more impressive the performance needed to win in the game. [I mostly agree. This states it is more impressive when a long underdog wins (and says nothing about how winning as a favorite is not impressive). I find it more impressive when the Celtics beat the Cav's in a 7-game playoff series in which they had a 0.5% edge rather than when the Mavericks beat the Spurs in a 4-game series during the regular season in which they were a 10% underdog. Why? Because of all the intangibles and external variables that go into a basketball game. And the playoffs. And everything else I said in my first post which has not been refuted.]

A second clarification: when a non-favorite wins, that is not necessarily impressive. How long do the odds need to be for a win or accomplishment to be impressive? That's a matter of taste. How difficult does a feat need to be to really impress you? [Apparently a lot. Like I said, watching the Bulls and Jordan absolutely dominate teams that they were technically "clearly favored over" was immensley impressive to me. THB was not impressed-- hence, the robot analogy. There is also a HUGE difference between a feat being difficult and the odds of achieving that feat. THB clearly swung a missed on this point. In order to achieve something really difficult, it is better to be really good at what you do. Hence, the odds leaning in their favor. Does that suddenly mean that the feat is no longer difficult? If someone has climbed Everest once already, the odds are they will make it the second time. Does that not make it impressive?]

Response to criticism 2: MDS misrepresents my point. In a single game, the outcome of the favorite winning is not impressive. That does not mean the win cannot be impressive. [Okay, you're splitting hairs here over semantics-- let's see where you go with this one.] It can be impressive in at least two ways: [That's it? Just two?]

1. The favorite can win by an impressive margin. The Celtics played the Nuggets in Denver on Monday. Is the fact that they won impressive? I don't think so. The odds that the Celtics would win (away and without KG) were probably in the 40-60% range. What impressed me was the margin of victory. What are the odds that, under those circumstances (away and without KG) the Celtics beat the Nuggets by 40? I won't bother guesstimating. But they're low. The win was impressive because it was such a drubbing - the Celtics put in an impressive performance.
[Wrong in so many ways. I will outline just TWO WAYS though, hehe. One, beating a team by 40 could mean the other team simply did not show up. They could tank, give up on their coach--- teams play really shitty every now and then. That is sports, that is life. It is difficult to maintain the consistency, especially in the circumstances surrounding the NBA (I spoke about this in point 6). It happens more often in the NBA than in any other sport for these reasons.

Two, a team winning a really intense game where both teams played evenly and brought out the best in eachother is extremely more impressive than winning by 40. Back to the Celtics analogy, the Celtics beating the Nuggest on an off night by 40 (w/o KG) is not as impressive as the Celtics playing a great game against a great Lakers team where it goes down to the wire and the Celtics pull out a close win. I would like to see how THB argues with this.]

2. A team (which could be the favorite) can win from improbable circumstances. What's a good example here? Let's stick with the Celtics. Is the fact that they won Game 4 of the 2008 NBA finals (an away game) impressive? Not very. Their odds of winning were probably somewhere in the 30-50% range. Fast forward to the third quarter when they trailed by 24 points in the third quarter. At this point, their odds of winning were very low. If you played the game from that point, the Lakers win almost every time. It's difficult for the Celtics to come back from that position. But the game is only played once, and the Celtics were gutsy enough to win it. That's impressive. [Yes, this is also impressive. Similar circumstances, on a much smaller scale, occur in every win. A team wins due to some factor, that factor usually being an impressive performance by a player or by the team.]

(There are lots of similar examples: Tiger Woods winning the 2008 US Open by coming from behind on broken leg and torn ACL, Nadal winning the 2009 Australian Open against Federer on hard courts in five sets after playing a 5+ hour match two nights before, and, yes, Kobe scoring 15 in the fourth quarter to help beat the Spurs in the 2008 playoffs).

In addition, a favorite can impress by winning consistently. A good example is the 1996 Bulls. Take any single game. The outcome of the Bulls winning, with arguably the greatest team ever, is not surprising or impressive. (They could win in impressive fashion in either of the two ways above, but the outcome itself is not impressive). The fact that they won 72 games is impressive. Why? Although they are favored to win each game, the Bulls also have some chance of losing each game. That chance is not insignificant - they're playing other NBA teams, as MDS is quick to point out. To win 72 out of 82 games requires a 88% winning percentage. That means the 19996 Bulls either had a 88% chance (on average) of winning each game, or it means they beat the odds by consistently performing on such a high level. [Contradiction: so the odds of the 95-96 Bulls winning their division, conference, and championship (at the beginning of the season) would be much higher than everyone else according to you (you state they were possibly the greatest team ever). You have already stated how this is not impressive. However, you then state that beating the odds by consistently performing on such a high level is impressive. This is exactly my point about the 2008 Lakers winning the Western Conference title. In the same way the Bulls were always favored, the Lakers were always favored. This is why good teams and good players are impressive. No, I'm not saying that the 2008 Lakers were as impressive as the Bulls winning 72 games.]

Finally, individual plays and players can impress in all kinds of ways. They can make really difficult shots. They can make difficult shots consistently. They can perform athletic feats that we thought weren't possible. They can perform well in the toughest/most critical of circumstances (when most would be unable to succeed). They can do all three:

Response to criticism 3: Who cares? Make the assumptions much lower. Assume the Lakers have a 60% chance of beating the Nuggets, a 57.5% chance of beating the Jazz, and a 55% chance of beating the Spurs. They still have a 28.5% chance of making the Finals, and their odds are still better than any other team in the West. The outcome of the Lakers reaching the 2008 Finals is still not that impressive to me. If you had to guess who would make it, you would guess the Lakers. [This matters for two reasons. One, it is irresponsible and inaccurate to apply these odds since you have no idea. You just admitted you have no idea, and your entire argument rests upon these odds. You state earlier that the degree to which a team is favored matters in how impressive the win is (which I have already shown is just silly). So these odds do matter for the sake of your argument.

Two, you say they now have a 28.5% chance of making the Finals. How is this not impressive according to your logic? Would you find it impressive if the Orlando Magic overtook the Cav's and the Celtic's to win the Eastern Conference this year? Because those odds are around 28.5%.]

Response to criticism 4: It was funny. The kitchen smelled like gas. One of the hosts said, "Oh shoot, you're leaning the stove." "Just trying to ignite the party," I shot back, without a moment's hesitation. I counted 3-4 chuckles, ranging from polite to almost-genuine, out of the 5-6 people in earshot. And MDS himself gave a chuckle, nay a short chortle, if I remember correctly. He might say he was laughing at me, not with me. Impossible. Because I was laughing at my own joke. [True, I laughed at the comment. I lied because I was jealous-- I was thinking of something really stupid (along those lines) to say to her as well, but you were too quick. We can't all be like The Todd