A comparison to last year 16 games in.

Pardon me if others have done this, but I'm just so excited! I remember last year feeling a sense of underwhelming dread at 16 games, so I decided to do some basic comparison with last year and see if we really are that much better!

First, Our record (W-L):

07-08: 5-11

08-09: 10-6

As you can see we are definitely winning many more games, but are they quality? What about the quality of opponent? How many are at home/away? Let's look....

Combined records of all opponents by the end of our sixteenth game each season (W-L):

07-08: 143-113 (.559 Win percentage) (All games played by opponents before 11/30/2007)

08-09: 123-117 (.513 Win percentage) (All games played by opponents before 11/25/2008)

From this we can see that we had actually faced slightly higher quality opponents last year at sixteen games. This doesn't tell the whole story though. Last year we had a more relaxed schedule when compared to this year. Last year we played 16 games in 31 days, while this year we played the same amount of games in 29 days.  Lets look at some other factors.

Total home/away games after sixteen games:

07-08: 8 home/8 away

08-09: 6 home/10 away

# of back to backs after sixteen games:

07-08: 4

08-09: 5

After looking at these two we can see that we have 2 days less rest, 2 extra games on the road, and one more back-to-back set of games when compared to last year. I think that more than makes up for quality of opponent. So what about how we are winning or losing. We can get some of this info from our point differential.

Point differential after sixteen games:

07-08: -5.3 (Blazer average points 91.3; Opponents 96.6)

08-09: +4.5 (Blazer average points 98.4; Opponents 93.9)

These are some huge differences from this same time last year, and even though it comes against slightly better teams this year, it is still phenomenal. Consider that the improvement of 9.8 points is about the same spread that separates this year's Sacramento Kings team from the Houston Rockets. Or think that out of this year's teams only the Thunder, Clippers, Grizzlies, Wizards, and Kings have a worse point differential than we had last year after sixteen games. Here is even more proof that we are a completely different team from last year:

How we won/lost games last year (First sixteen games only, 07-08):

Games won by 20+ Points: 0

Games won by 10-19 Points: 1

Games won by 1-9 Points: 4

Games lost by 1-9 Points: 7 (4 of these games lost by 9 points exactly)

Games lost by 10-19 Points: 3

Games lost by 20+ Points: 1

So in other words, last year at this time we had never blown a team out, had only one double digit win, and our other four wins were close. We were beat by double digits 3 times, blown out once, and were only closely competitive in three of these losses. Yuck..........now I know why I felt bad last year. Let's compare that with this year:

How we have won/lost games this year (First sixteen games only, 08-09):

Games won by 20+ Points: 3

Games won by 10-19 Points: 0

Games won by 1-9 Points: 7

Games lost by 1-9 Points: 3 (all of them competitive)

Games lost by 10-19 Points: 2

Games lost by 20+ Points: 1

This year we have three blowout wins, unbelievably the same amount we had all last year! Also last year's first blowout win came in our 37th game, Jan 14th against the Nets. We (surprisingly) still don't have any solid double digit wins, but we have been very good in close games, taking 7 out of 10. We have been beaten solidly once less than last year and have been blown out only against the hate L@kers in our first game.

I guess after looking at all the facts I can happily say that I have no qualms feeling good about where we are right now! All the stats seem to show that we are playing much better than last year against comparable opponents, with a worse schedule! Even our defense is better (No, really! Check out points allowed versus last year at the same time, our rebounds, blocks, and steals are all up).

It's wonderful to be a Blazers fan right now!!!