Do Preseason Games Matter?

[spectre]

Buckets Over Broadway

During the pre-season, coaches frequently don’t even play their starters at the end of a game and often give plenty of time to marginal players, making it all seem somewhat inconsequential. But is that true? For those of us obsessed with hoops we still care about pre-season games ‘cuz we’ve been jonesing for some bball and we love to parse any little bits of data, trying to extract larger meaning from it all. We know that if the Knicks lose a game where they have Andy Rautins and Landry Fields playing the key final minutes of the fourth quarter that we shouldn’t put much stock into the loss. Although, god dang it, we sure wish we’d won.

~more at the link~

Preseason: What you see is what you’ll get - 48 Minutes of Hell

Does preseason basketball really mean anything? And if so, how well does preseason performance predict regular season success? If you read the title, there may not be much suspense to the first question. Yes, teams that do well in the preseason also tend to succeed in the regular season.

~more at the link~

Roland Beech, 82games.com

Sure the preseason games matter to the players trying to make the team, the veterans trying to test out their bodies coming from injuries, and for the league itself perhaps to have some build up for the regular season tipoff. The question though is do the preseason records matter?
Is a team's won-lost mark in the exhibition games any indication or tip-off as to how the regular season will unfold? You hear announcers hand down their opinions, but I've yet to see any study on the matter...so let's examine the issue 82games style!

~more at the link~

Fats at RGM:

Preseason Games Thread

i am prepared for business as usual for this team in november, which means we start out slow losing a lot of games, scoring very little points and shooting a putrid % from the field.

november records for each season

2004: 3-10
2005: 5-11
2006: 4-11
2007: 6-8
2008: 5-11
2009: 7-9 (saved by a 4 game win steak to end the month)

overall: 30-60 33%

bobcats preseason records

2004: 3-5
2005: 3-5
2006: 2-6
2007: 2-6
2008: 0-8
2009: 2-6
2010: 0-3

total: 12-39 24%

the preseason seems to be a pretty good predictor of how the bobcats will play in november. we have 6 years of stats to look at and each year the preseason performance has been pretty close to the november performance.

bobcats ppg

preseason/regular season
2004: 88.1/94.3
2005: 93.1/96.9
2006: 97.8/96.9
2007: 96.7/97.1
2008: 88.6/93.6
2009: 94.6/95.3
2010: 81.0/?

lets hope the ppg comes up a little in the next 5 games or else we could be looking at the worst offense in the history of the franchise (and that is saying alot) the preseason ppg seems to be a decent predictor of our ppg for the upcoming season. usually add 1 to 5ppg to preseason ppg to find out what to expect for regular season.

We were discussing this in one of the preseason game threads. With so much new info (and a little old) I figured it could stand it's own thread.

[ziggy]

In the preseason the most important things are getting the end of your roster figured out and getting the young players some minutes.

Until the regular season tips off wins and losses mean nothing.

[itsbcbaby]

Sure it matters. Like somebody above said, it's more along the lines of helping out the younger players and figuring out the end of the rotation.

We seem to have a log-jam of tweener, 6-7/6-8/6-9 SF/PF combos (UPS, Miles, Maguire) and I think the preseason has verified most of our thought's that UPS should be the clear cut backup 3.

DJ is also getting more time which is a plus as a first year starter - and now that Henderson is healthy, we get a chance to see if he is ready to contribute.

[BlockParty]

It only matters if one of your key players gets hurt

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