One more sleep. One more sleep until we watch a game that actually matters. One more sleep until the dam of caution and restraint, constructed by summer league and preseason, finally bursts. One more sleep.
H0wever, not to dampen the anticipation of long-awaited legitimate analysis, there is one question that must be asked – how much weight should we put on the result of opening night? Obviously, the fact that game 1 is apart of the 82 that decide playoff participation dictates that it is a better
predictor of season success than summer league and preseason, but what does this initial outcome actually say about the direction of the season?
So, with the information provided on Basketball Reference the help of the calculative capabilities granted by a Google Gemini Subscription (I take my statistical analysis course next semester), I will outline how end-of-season winning percentages throughout Jazz history were impacted by (a) whether game 1 was a win or loss and (b) the point differential in game 1. Hopefully, by the end of this, we will be able to quantify just how mad we are statistically allowed to be at Zach Edey and his moving screens.
Is there predictive power in margin of victory?
Using a Pearson correlation coefficient (the statistical measure of the strength of the relationship between two variables), we can confidently say that, at least for the Utah Jazz, there is no statistically significant relationship between game 1 margin of victory and end-of-season winning percentage. This coefficient, often denoted with r, falls on a scale of -1 to 1. -1 would indicate a strong negative relationship between the margin of victory and winning percentage; if the Jazz win by 20 points, you can predict that we’ll finish the season near the bottom of the pack. 1 would indicate the opposite; a blowout win would put us firmly in championship contention. However, the stats don’t paint nearly as black-or-white a picture as either depicted on the polar ends. Instead, the predictive power of margin of victory is defined as r=0.11, which is statistically negligible. The graph below examines this relationship clearly:
If game 1 margin of victory dictated the end of season winning percentage, we could expect for all 52 of these dots to neatly fall into a clean, diagonal line. The scattered, erratic nature of these units instead tells us that we can ascertain essentially nothing about where the Jazz will be in April by how many points they win or lose by in October’s initial outing. In fact, when isolating the other 81 games, an additional 10 points in the margin of victory, in favor of the Jazz, only adds an expected .6 wins to their end of season win/loss record.
A few interesting, if ultimately inconsequential facts that I learned through this aspect of the study:
- The four worst game 1 losses in Jazz history all occurred in seasons that the team ended up making the playoffs (’87, ‘12, ‘03, ‘91)
- I remember vividly how game 1 of 2022-2023 caused everyone to immediately reanalyze their offseason predictions for the first year after Rudy Gobert and Donovan Mitchell – a 21 point win against the reigning champions OBVIOUSLY means something, right? While that team was surprisingly competitive, this graph could’ve helped to temper some expectations.
- I maintain, against the logic of the stats that I have presented, that the 26 point opening night win in 2004-2005 (the largest in franchise history) could’ve meant something if the team had a bit more health throughout the year. Kirilenko (who had 8 blocks this game) and Boozer faced serious injuries throughout the year, and thus couldn’t maintain the obvious synergy that the two had archetypically.
Summary: The statistical impact of margin of victory on the end-of-season win totals is unsubstantial.
Is there predictive power in a game 1 victory?
While margin of victory teaches us next to nothing about the state of the team come playoff time, the same is not true in regards to whether the opening contest is a win or a loss. Instead, a Jazz opening night win more than doubles the likelihood that they will win the season with 50 wins or more. Whether you include in your sample the opening night victory or not, beginning the season 1-0 instead of 0-1 brings an expected swing of 5 to 6 wins by the end of the year. Check out the graph below for the full results:
Now, even though this results are based on the full history of the Jazz franchise, the sample size is still relatively small. Nevertheless, the numbers do all tell the same story – good Jazz teams tend to win their first game, and great Jazz teams very rarely lose theirs. I wish I could’ve continued the surprising tone I used in the discussion on margins of victory, but alas, common wisdom prevails: winning one basketball game leads to winning more. Call me an analytics nerd if you want, but I am confident, in spite of all the traditionalists, that Utah should try to beat the Grizzlies.
Summary: The statistical impact of a game 1 victory on the end-of-season total is significant.
Opening Night Action Items
Now, let me be clear – this is far from the most scholarly research project ever conducted. On top of the lack of controlling for opponent or game location, estimating win totals based on opening night outcome in the context of this Utah Jazz history study is more so a test of whether the team was starting Karl Malone or John Collins at power forward. Suffice it to say, I will not be sending this study to my political inquiry professor.
However! My job title is not data analyst. No, I am a blogger for a Utah Jazz website, and we will use numbers in the way that we see fit. With that in mind, I propose three actions items:
- Do not lose your cool if the Grizzlies play us closer than you’d like
- The Grizzlies are young. They have no former all stars. This seems to be a year of rebuild instead of competition (although I think Edey and Boozer is a duo that could push them closer to play-in status than people expect). Even considering all of this, not even the most optimistic of Jazz fans have a strong statistical basis for worry if it takes the team til the final buzzer to seal an opening day win. We can tell very little about the trajectory of the season based on the point differential, 1 point or 30.
- Remember the existence of outliers
- By my money, the 1997-1998 Utah Jazz are the second best squad that the franchise has ever assembled. If your sole datapoint was game 1, that is not what you would expect. They flew into Los Angeles and got trounced by 17, likely fooling a Jazz fan or two into thinking that the teams window was officially closed. While the stats didn’t necessarily paint a pretty picture for this iteration of the Jazz, they also did not spell doom – outliers are a part of the calculus, and that remains true, even if the Grizzlies win in a blow-out.
- If we win, make sure your June is open for the championship parade
- I am far from an unbiased observer. No, I am a Jazz fan, ride or die, which means that I will take the general vibe of the numbers I have discovered and twist them until they tell me that my team will be the champions of the world. The Jazz teams that win game 1 are more likely to win 50 games. On opening night, with the blood flowing, I read that stat as the Jazz teams that win game 1 WILL win 50 games. Really, opening night should be the one night a year that we need not be dictated by facts… unless we lose by 30, and then we find solace in an LLM-produced graph.
How many games do you wait to have passed before you’re ready to press the panic-button? Sound off below!
