Good offensive play and/or poor defense can lead to more open looks from distance, but often it does just come down to whether shooters are in rhythm or not.

I am actually not all that concerned with our defense. What does concern me is that on offense we remain a perimeter oriented team and even more so last night with LMA out for much of the game. The only inside game is on dribble penetration from Roy and occasionally Miller. Thus, our poor shooting made the game much closer than it should have been. We need to develop Greg Oden into more of a consistent low post threat on offense! Last night he took only 5 shots, and 2 or 3 of them were on offensive rebound putback dunks. That is crazy!! He should be getting around 10 shots a game from the low post. We need to go through the inevitable growing pains now and it will pay big dividends down the road later in the season and post season. Otherwise we are destined to the same fate as last year.

Especially against Houston the other night, I saw the Blazers work hard and get deflections on defense, only to see the loose balls end up in the hands of the Rockets for easy buckets.

Good points about luck having a factor in a small sample size, and also about the effect on the opponent’s D resulting from hot or cold outside shooting …

I’d like to expand on your these to say that luck has a large factor to play over a larger sample size as well.

I mean, last year, if the end of that last SA game of the year hadn’t gone against us, we wouldn’t have played Houston. That was about as unlikely a break as you can get. Last year, we got lucky with a lot of back-to-backs. As teams vary in how well they are playing, you can be fortunate playing good teams when they are cold. You can get a ref who likes your team, or maybe one who doesn’t.

The timing of your and your opponent injuries have a huge effect, and are largely attributable to luck: we were lucky JR was injured the other night, just couldn’t capitalize. We may even be lucky that Nic is injured early, so Martell can show his stuff, to reduce our minutes logjam, and hopefully so he can be available for good D in the postseason.

In short, I’d rather be lucky than good… but good teams can also make a lot of their own good fortune… And the good usually beat the lucky and not so good… So hopefully, the Blazers can become good and lucky…

Timing is everything, and a lot of that is luck.

Attributing deviations from season average to luck alone would be statistical insufficiency I think. For example what are the standard deviations each for good teams and bad teams?

If a team hits 67% of its shots against losing teams and 33% of its shots against winning teams its average will be 50% but would individual games within teams in these categories establish a different expectation for them? What about home and away?

Luck to one person might mean hot/cold to another. Is this the same thing? Teams go through hot and cold streaks. Are all of these luck?

Your well-reasoned post simply suggests that some of it is luck and I have no argument. But my read of the implication made me want to subtract the low average from the low shooting and call the rest luck and the same for the high. In actuality good defenders when motivated get statistically better results. The averages include “playing down to opponents” by good teams aptly documented elsewhere. Portland was desperate for the win last night and was working really hard. So I want to give credit to that as well as find the comments by Martell about not working hard enough in Houston as some evidence of the bad defense contributing, Am I off track?