That wasn’t supposed to be crossed out, but if you put hyphens in the same sentence in two places, apparently it crosses out everything in between.

Maybe it’s the software crossing out the 6 categories idea. I’ll take it as written.

I think there are so many variables that boiling things down to a single number, as you’ve done here, has its value, but it obscures so much.

Does Phoenix really have the second easiest remaining schedule? Well, they have 16 (!) remaining home games against losing teams. They haven’t played a single home game against the teams with less than 10 wins yet, so they have a lot of cupcake games.

On the other hand, they’ve only played 6 road games against winning teams, with 14 left. Now, 16 is more than 14, so that averages out to an easier schedule (of course, I’m ignoring the question of the varying strength of opposition, but assuming for the sake of discussion that the strong are about as strong as the weak are weak).

But when you are trying to get to 50+ wins, do 16 almost sure wins cancel out 14 likely losses? Not really.

So a single number weighting is really nice for a quick overview, but it (necessarily) obscures important information (as do my silly projections).

To put it another way, if you are trying to get to 50+ wins, I would rather have 16 home games against Chicago and 14 road games against Miami than have 16 home games against OKC and 14 road games at Cleveland. The two options might boil down to the same single number, but the latter option results in probably 15 of 16 home wins and maybe only 2-3 of 14 road wins, while the former option probably results in 13 or 14 home wins and perhaps 7-8 road wins — 21 wins vs. 17-18.

This flaw applies to the kind of stuff I’ve been doing, too, because I only use four categories of games. By factoring in the actual win-loss record of the opponents, you bring data into play that I’m not using, but you obscure the actual number of difficult games. It’s all tradeoffs. There’s no perfect way to look at it all without either having too much data to mentally absorb or obscuring the data.

Next year, I propose that we just win all of our games, and then we won’t have to worry about all this stuff.

OKC and Memphis and the Bobcats and the Pacers, etc, are improving? NJ is improving? We have a lot of games left against teams that aren’t improving.

You are looking at last year and expecting the Jazz to go on a similar run this year. Last year, they were 18-15, but 19 of those first 33 were on the road. 12 of those 19 were against winning teams. This year, they’ve played six road games against winning teams.

Last year, they had home games against Boston, Cleveland, LA, & NO out of the way by this point. This year, all those games are still sitting out there on their schedule waiting to get them. They’ve already lost as many at home this year as they lost all of last year. They will lose more.

If they win at L.A. and sweep their four game homestand coming up, I’ll believe they’ve righted the ship, and that the schedule won’t hurt them. I don’t expect them to win at L.A., and I won’t be surprised at all if New Orleans or Detroit beats them in Utah.

I won’t be shocked if Utah makes a run and survives, but I just can’t believe that every other contender is going to go on a run. If we maintain our current level of play, we’ll get 53-54 or more wins, and that isn’t going to miss the playoffs.

I’m not sure why you think older teams are likely to improve more over the course of a season than a team like Portland, which has a starting center who is already effective despite the fact he is just learning to play the NBA game, and a starting SF who has missed the whole season so far.

The biggest in-season improvement in the West this year is coming from Greg Oden. He is already far superior to the player we saw earlier, and there’s no reason to expect him to regress. If you ask an impartial observer which team is most likely to improve over the course of the season, they would look at Portland (because of Oden and Martell) and Utah (because of their injuries).