MODE

I want to know something about the Cavs.  Does anyone keep track of their mode on points per quarter and their average deviation from that?  It seems like a fairly simple stat, but I think it would give a lot of information about them/teams.  Are the teams consistent in their specific quarter by quarter play throughout games the most successful teams?  Is it actually the quarter to quarter relation in scoring within a game that’s what makes a team successful?

I want to know if we were to consistently have great first quarters followed by a slumping second quarter and average third and fourth quarters if we have a better chance to win than when we have fluky out of proportion scoring quarters like during the Lakers's game.  Is mode an effective analytic tool?

Here are the quarter by quarter points for the Cavs’s wins:

31 19 24 20

31 26 27 24

19 21 24 28

27 29 26 31

25 14 32 29

What do the numbers say then?

When looking at the Cav’s wins, which is a very small sample, mode doesn’t appear to be an effective evaluator for us.  Our mode for quarters in general is 31, which happened only three times.  I’d love it if we could just always get 31 points in a quarter every game, but that is not going to happen. 

31 happens to be the only number we actually repeated in a specific quarter by quarter matching in a won game too.  I think this is just a result of small sample size and coincidence.   However, it did happen in the first quarter.  That definitely hints the Cavs need a cushion to win their games.

Since mode is so ineffective apparently, I’ll let you know some other things I’ve noticed.  We have a dip in our second quarter points.  We have only one win where we scored more in the second then the first.  Furthermore, if we win we have outscored our second quarter  3/5 times. 

What’s left to say?  We are inconsistent in our wins.  However, 31 has to be a magic number in some sense..  It is involved in 3/5 wins.  That means something right?

I’d love the opportunity to examine a bigger sample size.  Too bad, the Cavs fucked that up tonight.