Tommy Craggs:

As Alex remembers it now, Olajuwon had a double-double with nine blocks at some point during the fourth quarter. “Someone in management came to me and said, basically, Thou shalt give Hakeem Olajuwon a triple-double. Come hell or high water, he’s getting a triple-double. I’m like, uh, OK.” The Grizzlies had small monitors on which they kept a running box score. Anyone could see if someone was closing in on a milestone. “If a guy is in vicinity of a record, people are tracking those things. I know those things,” Alex says. “If a guy has an eight-game streak of getting 10 rebounds, I’ll know that. Am I gonna help that? Probably.” The Rockets game, though, “was the one time someone said, ‘You’ll do this.’ And I did.”

The NBA is currently working on a data-collecting system with STATS LLC, but it doesn’t sound like it could replace scorekeepers entirely.

and Sasha Pavlovic and the 46th pick in Thursday’s draft.

At first, I had thought that the Cavaliers had gone through with this deal to get Shaq’s expiring contract and clear cap space in order to re-sign LeBron James after the 2009 season—but it turns out that Wallace’s and Pavlovic’s deals are also expiring next year, according to ESPN’s NBA Trade Machine.

It appears, nevertheless, that Cleveland’s making the trade is in attempt to win a Championship, what with their core of LeBron, Mo Williams, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, and a gaggle of role players.

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• WhatifSports.com’s simulations have the Lakers beating the Magic 61.7 percent of the time, with the Lakers winning in six games most often. If Jameer Nelson platoons at point guard with Rafer Alston, the Lakers’ chance of winning goes down to 59.9 percent.

The simulation has the Lakers winning the last game in Orlando—Game Five—and the next at home to pull out the victory in six games.

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When you hear an announcer point out that only eight teams in NBA history have come back from down 3-1 in a seven-game series, and that only 4.5 percent of all teams in that situation have won the series, don’t listen.

The reason is sample bias. Teams that fall behind 3-1 are usually the worse team, so there’s no surprise that only eight teams have come back to win. But in Cleveland’s case, they’re nearly equal in talent with Orlando—in the four games this series, Orlando’s won by an average of just three points.

In fact, if you break down those eight comebacks, you see an evident trend:

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The NBA announced its All-Defensive team today, with Chris Paul, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Kevin Garnett, and Dwight Howard named to the first team, and Rajon Rondo, Dwyane Wade, Shane Battier, Ron Artest, and Tim Duncan named to the second.

To me, it appears that fans and analysts get caught up in the assumption that good offensive players also make good defensive players—in fact, I’d rather have Shane Battier or Ron Artest than any of the first-teamers.

82games.com lists the counterpart PER of every player on every team in the NBA—that is, the PER (Player Efficiency Rating) of the position guarded by the said player; for example, when LeBron lined up at small forward, opposing SFs had a 13.6 PER against James (15 is the league average).

That’s good defense by LeBron. But what about the other four members of the first team, especially Defensive Player of the Year Dwight Howard? And how do they match up against the second teamers?

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That’s the question posed by Jon Nichols, and he thinks he found the answer.

He looked at a large sample of current NBA players and found the correlations of their per-minute college and NBA stats, and found the following correlations:

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We’re halfway through the NBA season, so I decided to compare my preseason NBA Marcel projections to the actual results.

My stat of choice to compare the accuracy was linear weights PER. Using all players with 15 minutes per game that had a forecast (249 players), the correlation of their preseason projection and actual stats was .687, which isn’t bad.

In comparison, the correlation of baseball projections for batters usually float around that number as well.

John Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is a one-number measure of a player’s per-minute productivity, and it may be one of the best basketball stats out there.

The PER is computed using a detailed, complex formula that, in essence, adds for positive stats such as rebounds, assists, and steals, and subtracts for negative stats such as shots missed or turnovers.

But the formula is too complicated. I like recreating stats by myself (as if I made it), but I could never come around to PER—who would want to go through that formula?

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PER (Player Efficiency Rating) is a per-minute stat created by John Hollinger that, in his own words, "sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance." It uses a very complex formula to come up with the final PER, which are per-minute and pace-adjusted. *

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The Celtics’ chances of winning certain benchmarks after losing twice in a row:

wins	%chance		wins	%chance
70	11.1%		70+	74.0%
71	12.7%		72+	50.1%
72	13.1%		73+	37.0%
73	12.1%
74	9.9%
75	7.2%
76	4.5%
77	2.3%
78	1.0%

The 1995-96 Chicago Bulls reached 41-3 before losing twice, and then lost again later to go to 48-6. The Celtics would have to go 21-2 to reach that, something they’ve already done this year; they have a 41.6% chance of reaching 21, 22, or 23 wins in the next 23 games.