you would not be trying to predict how a team performs in the second half of the season utilizing their first half of the season as a reference point. That is fallacious and downright stupid.
I'm not sure what you're talking about right now. I'm genuinely not even sure whether you're trolling or being serious at this point. You just repeated what I already said countless times, and presented it as a criticism directed at me. You've done this a number of times now.
Look up the previous thread. I originally responded to a guy making a linear projection based on the current Oilers record and claiming that the Sabres have literally no chance of finishing the season 30th.
The 2 main points that I made were:
1) the Sabres have a realistic shot at finishing 30th;
2) it doesn't make sense to make a linear projection based on their current record.
After that I made a point that *if* we do make a future projection, we should acknowledge the fact that all the available evidence points to the fact that bad luck has had a significant effect on the current Oilers record.
If we're making a future projection, it obviously is impossible to take into account future events that can't be predicted or accounted for in any meaningful way. Bringing that up is redundant.
Milos said:
1. Oilers Schedule had the easiest stretches early on in the season.
As evidenced by what?
Milos said:
2. Countless times has a team started out great only to collapse later, or started out poor only to have a strong end to the season. Many times a team will have a linear progression. You're trying to tell people that this 'luck' thing will lead them to have a better record, and assuming their play won't change. What if they perform better? Worse? How many teams perform the same at game 38 as they do in game 82?
I think I'm repeating this the third time now: I'm not saying that they will have a better record. We're talking about probabilities, not certainties. Read the wikipedia article on Probability Theory, if you don't understand the distinction between these two phenomena.
No one knows if they're going to have a better record or not. You're consistently misrepresenting my words and creating ridiculous straw man arguments.
There's no reason to believe things are going to change for the better just as there is no reason to believe things are going to change for the worse, but you keep pretending there's reason.
There's a number of reasons to assume that it is likely that their record will improve. The predictive power of PDO, etc., is the only arguable part of my posts and you haven't even tried to address it yet. You haven't made a single point about Rob Vollman's Luck Chart.
Your argument is just really stupid and requires too many assumptions, and the fact is, no one can know how the season will go, and you're not being sensible by trying to suggest otherwise.
"Your argument is really stupid" is not really a valid counter-argument.
Oh, and another strawman, awesome.