- there is a 50% chance it will be sunny and 80 tomorrow in Boston, and a 50% chance it will snow a foot

- there is a 50% chance the high will be 55 and rain a bit, and a 50% chance the high will be 58 and it won't rain at all

one of those is a ludicrous prediction, the other is perfectly fine. the devil is in the details. if Simmons had changed "15" to "5" then it's fine, but when you throw #'s in your example they better be reasonable or else you look ridiculous. the line was -OKC 6.5 which means the distribution of most likely results falls right under this #, which is exactly the scenario Simmons said was LEAST likely. and I realize dumber things are said frequently, but I'm just debating the Yes/No of whether or not this is dumb, not trying to rank it on the ultimate dumb scale

Pretty sick tho

KB4Z,
CMI's point was more "if that tweet really bothers you, than I suggest you look at every prediction made by every sports writer ever". Especially given how some people on this itt have criticized Aaron Schatz for saying every game is basically 60/40.

KB4Z,


This probably comes down to lots of internet nittery, but Id describe "there is a 50% chance it will be sunny and 80 tomorrow in Boston, and a 50% chance it will snow a foot" as "ludicrous and almost certainly wrong", and "There is a 50% chance of clear skies all day and 100% chance of rain tomorrow" as being "at odds w/ itself."

Im in no way trying to say that its not dumb, just that its not historically dumb like the "arent all games 50-50?" guy. So, prob not much disagreement between us.






"the line was -OKC 6.5 which means the distribution of most likely results falls right under this #"


No it doesn't.

The only hard conclusion we can draw from that is that a sportsbook was willing to make a market at OKC -6.5.


If we make a few assumptions and agree that that line represents the "true" line, the only conclusion we can draw is that it is equally likely OKC-6.5 wins as it is that Mem+6.5 wins. It doesn't tell us anything concrete about how likely OKC is to win by exactly 6 or 7 or 18. (Note, that the bolded isnt event inconsistent w/ what simmons said, but Im taking issue with the statement in quotes itself and not how anything relates to simmons)


IF you wanted to attempt to use a single betting line to derive information about the distribution of scores in a basketball game you could probably start looking at the distribution of score differences for all games w/ a -6.5 line over some reasonable sample size. But, you are going to need to be assuming that this game isnt meaningfully different from a typical -6.5 game and that can be a source of introduced error.



Obv, if the game happened to have money line quotes at 8 different spreads we can start to build some distribution.

yeah forget who.. and he put one Jones non-pussy cat song in between, then it went back to pussycat.

edit: yeah that guy

post of the thread

he was on espn2 last night. I kinda feel bad for him. Pro: you get to live the sportswriter's dream, appear on TV from time to time, and get a podcast that's listened to by a zillion people. Con: your voice sounds like the snot-nosed kid from "Home Movies".

http://deadspin.com/5803215/bill-sim...-swinging-dick

This kinda makes me like him more and less at the same time.

Hilarious that some site was ripping him and he wanted ESPN to save him or something, but I kinda like the just open ego he shows. Simmons as an ******* makes him slightly tolerable.

Don't quote me, but I think he was actually being ripped by the big sports radio station in Boston and it is ESPN's partner, and then he got in trouble for ripping them because they are ESPN's partner.

new ESPN book looks decent but wtf at 784 pages!!

I think it's gonna be pretty awesome though, lol.

new closterman podcast is up!

There's 80 pages on Linda Cohn's vaginal rejuvenation procedure.

You can skip that part.

yeah this is what happened

WEEI's afternoon show was disagreeing with something he wrote/said, and they were gonna have Simmons on the show to talk about it, but Simmons got butthurt, didn't go on their show, and instead went on with a competing Boston station.

ESPN radio would be about a million times better if they let their talent really rip other espn talent.

Book looks great. I'm amazed how much stuff was said on the record.

This is pretty douchey lol.

WEEI really is a bunch of reprehensible human beings.

There's no good guy in this story.

Klosterman is inane, as usual. He's completely worthless, and it's sad Simmons is so enamored of him.

Chuck, being painfully self-conscious doesn't lend anything to your tired observations. And he argues against things that no one even believes. Total fraud.

He did some podcast I forget which from some radio station, I think it was the Matthew Berry one, and he sounded 100 times better/less wussy. Odd.

Klosterman is obviously very inconsistent. Some of his pop culture stuff/music stuff is obviously good, but when he doesn't know what he's talking about he's 10000x worse then Simmons as he doesn't have the casualfan image.

I like Klosterman, but man is he an awkward interviewer. Every time he asked a question he was interrupting Barkley and completely changing the subject without even trying to segue smoothly.

Also, there was a weird spot with 5 or 6 minutes left when they went from talking about "Joe Schmoe from the Nets" coming out to Travis Outlaw getting in trouble. Was that just a really careless edit or did I miss something?

i had to stop listening to both podcasts.

this post so much. I really thought I was the only Klosterman hater until I read this thread.

About to listen to the most recent one. Already hate Klosterman, but if he can make me stop listening to Charles Barkley, then he really is the WOAT.