Just as they did in the first meeting, the Hornets controlled the first three quarters of the game. This time, however, they were able to withstand a 4th quarter Warriors run to start off their road trip with a 112-103 victory. (box). All five starters scored in double figures, as David West and Trevor Ariza led the way with 22 and 19, respectively. Chris Paul added 18 points, needing just 9 shots to do so, and beautifully controlled the game by dishing out 17 assists.
The Hornets went up by as many as 25 early in the 4th quarter before Golden State went on a run to cut it down to 11 with just under three minutes left. Monty was forced to put the starters back in the game at that point to ensure victory, and he didn’t looked to pleased about it. The bench was sloppy on both ends of the court, constantly turning the ball over and missing rotations on the defensive end. It is understandable that they don’t play with urgency given the circumstances, but they performed much better in similar circumstances- particularly in Atlanta. Monty would love to have faith in his bench to finish out games, but nights like this will cause him to think twice in the future. Hopefully they get another chance Saturday night in Sacramento to extend and already large 4th quarter lead.
Other Notes and Observations:
– In some ways it was a very typical Chris Paul performance, and in other ways it was atypical. 18 points and 17 assists- typical. 6 turnovers and zero steals (in a game where the Hornets had 9)- atypical.
– The Hornets starters shot a combined 33-48 from the field. That is nearly 70%! Â The Hornets could get practically anything they wanted in this game, and it was nice to see that they weren’t just settling for jumpers and 3’s.
– More on that point, the Hornets had 60 points in the paint (2nd most this season) and 35 fast-break points, which were by far the highest amount this season. If you were to tell me however, that the starters would shoot 70%, they Hornets would score 60 in the paint and 35 on the break I would have guessed they won by 40. And the reason they didn’t…
– Turnovers. The Hornets committed 23 turnovers, 11 of which were by their two point guards. Golden State will give you whatever you want if you stay patient, but far too often the Hornets tried to force the issue and ended up turning the ball over. Golden State got as close as 4 in the third before the Hornets pulled away again, but every run GS made was as a result of bad turnovers.
– Pretty much an even split for our three-headed two guard. Thornton had 22 minutes, Marco had 21, and Willie had 20. They combined for 27 points on 12-23 shooting, 8 assists, 5 rebounds, and 2 steals. If the Hornets can get anything close to that production from those guys, they will be a very tough team to beat.
– As predicted, the four Golden State studs got theirs, but the Hornets did a good job not letting anybody else beat them. Take away Curry, Ellis, Lee, and Wright and the other 6 Warriors only scored 16 points on 5-19 shooting. Last game guys like Udoh and Amundsen had big contributions, this game they didn’t and shutting down those role players were a key reason for the victory.
– Vegas lost their share of money on this game, as 98% of gamblers took the over and these two teams crushed that number. I just can’t imagine the Warriors ever being in a game where less than 200 points are scored, but Vegas had faith in our defense I guess.
– Hornets go for a franchise record 11th straight victory Saturday night in Sacramento. The next two after that look favorable as well as they finish up the road trip at Phoenix before coming home to face the Wizards- a team that has still not won a game on the road this season.
44 responses to “Hornets hold on to defeat Warriors, capture 10th straight victory”
Chris was sick about his turnovers on the radio. He asked if he had 6 or 7. They told him 6 and he was still mad. He basically sounded like he lost the game for us in the 4th.
That thing about hating losing more than loving winning . . . so true for him.
Yeah, I see CP was doing his best Rajon Rondo imitation with 17 assists and, more importantly, 6 turnovers.
i think winners for the caption shuld be announced in the post game cause that would be cool. but its a lot of work so i can see y not
The only reason I didn’t this time is because the winner for me was something that was SOOOOO inappropriate. Let’s just say I laughed the hardest at a comment that implied that the child was bigger in certain areas.
Pahaha, I’m obsessed with you!
Not in the creepy way, though…seriously..
hahah yea that one was pretty damn funny
Vegas doesnt care about us or the Warriors. They makes guesses to determine what will make them the most money. It doesnt even qualify as a trailing indicator. Vegas is not an an indicator of anything. NBA2K is at least a basketball simulation. Vegas odds are the means most likely to sucker people to give up their money.
I spent 11 years in the casino industry. I wish you would stop thinking gaming odds somehow more reliable than a Magic 8 Ball. Its not.
Such economic devices are extremely good at gauging public perceptions, which, overall, are right far better than 1/2 the time and far worse than 90% of the time.
This is inaccurate. If you have the volume and dollar value of the wagers placed, THEN you would know something. What you are given is the payouts the casino will offer you based on their previous bets so that they balance and the house makes money. If they can take one bet, thats great. even better is when they can take both offsetting bets. Sometimes they take none. They also dont tell you what the historical odds of the event have been. They dont stay static over time. They move so that the house can balance the bets.
Let me give you a hypothetical. If MJ bets $1,000,000 that the Bobcats will win every game this year and there are no competing bets, the line will heavily favor that the Bobcats will lose one game. Everyone will bet that they will lose one at good odds. As they bet, the payout will drop as the long-shot $1m bet will be sufficiently hedged and the house makes it money. You also have to consider that the house has to react to stupid bets.
If youre familiar with momentum stock traders, you understand the distance from the activiy of the business is. They are tarding based on the difference between the moving averages. As the average points to a rise on stock price, the trade and in the process affect the outcome of the price movement. The underlying realities of the business are not or lightly considered. Thats casino odds.
It’s not inaccurate. And I agree on casino odds . . . That’s kind of my point.
I’m assuming Vegas is taking a large number of bets and for a large amount of money, sure. Their correct moves on average (they are still in business) tells us about the overall opinion of the public.
For a particular instance, a ‘small whole number’ kind of question can’t be answered by statistics. No analysis will tell you ‘heads or tails’ for a fairish coin.
I’m with Stormy on this one. Vegas odds never mean who is more likely to win or whatever, it just controls the bets. It’s as entertaining as a Zodiac in the local newspaper, and as informative.
I’d prefer 24/7 stick to basketball statistics, which y’all do well. But, doesn’t bother me to use Vegas odds. It’s not like you’re trying to coerce me into following your religion.
[…] Hornets have won ten straight. They win in bunches, those […]
It’s not inaccurate.
He was there, seeing how casino sports betting works, and then you say he’s wrong? (Anyway, what he described tracks with what I’ve read from other sources.)
No. I think we are agreeing, though I think he’s misunderstanding my point, which is entirely my fault.
It’s all math, modeling, and clear definition of terms. We don’t have that here, which is fine.
All I’m saying is there good information in the vegas stuff Michael etc. talk about. Whether it is what you would hope is situational.
Then you misunderstood my point. My point was that there is NO useful information from vegas odds UNLESS you know the supporting information, which you dont unless you are the bookmaker. If Vegas odds have any value to a Hornets fan then so does Tarot card readings. They are equally illustrative.
Illustrative about what? I’m talking about the opinion of the folks betting.
‘Knowing’ that the house is operating without long term losses combined with the info presented at a point in time tells you something about what the masses believe. Opening lines are less informative about public opinion than later lines, provided a stable situation (Star player out suddenly). The coupling of public opinion to outcomes is more slippery.
But odds don’t really tell you what the masses believe. They tell you what bookmakers think the masses believe. The numbers will be adjusted as bets are played. So, watching the trends of changing odds might tell you what the masses believe, but not single odds.
They don’t tell you who is likely to win, agreed. If that’s what someone wants, the horoscope is just as good, agreed.
A single data point tells you nothing, agreed.
Lots of data does, however, tell you something. That something is about money wagered, and money is a measure of an opinion.
A strategy to decide what the public opinion is that is based on the fact that in the long run (lots of odds) there is good info in such odds etc., and that the bookhouse is well-operated, would lead you to assess the public opinion correctly at that rate. It won’t be right all the time, and sometimes the predictions don’t even make sense for an event.
For instance, the average family has, say, 2.3 kids. What does that mean? It better not mean that I find alof of 0.3 kids on my block, for sure. It means if I talk to n families, then I expect to have talked to 2.3n kids, assuming everyone is home, etc.
What does it mean for there to be 60% chance of rain? It means on 60% of the days where they say that, it rains, whatever that means (what if the cloud doesn’t go over me?). It means nothing for today. However, if I make the bet based on those odds, and they pay evenly, then I can win in the long run. If I’m the bookhouse, I adjust the payoffs and the lines to keep game zero sum. Yada yada yada. Considering that opinion is what is being measured by money wagered, and not team performance, then that is what is a product of the reverse engineering.
Again, these are fuzzy things, but entire industries are based on similar methods.
Full disclosure: I don’t gamble, never have. I worked those problems (did the math) out long ago and know better.
42, stormsurgephoto
I realize that it doesn’t cover sporting events but how does a site like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrade fit into this discussion?
To me this fits into 42’s statement, “Such economic devices are extremely good at gauging public perceptions.”
I must admit I don’t know much about gambling. I have never placed a bet in my life.
Here’s another:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market
It’s more general.
Consider elections: elections are bets, really. If asked “Who do you want to be president” you may want to respond with someone who is not an option, like me, or my mother. Also, many people don’t just vote in principle (many do) because they want to pick someone `realistic’. A vote is power that is spent, so these predictive markets are great with elections. They don’t perfectly gauge the feelings of all, but on the constrained stage that elections exist on, they work wonderfully since they are parallel. This is more true for elections than predictions about sports, but the connection is not vacuous.
Great discussion, I think. We have lots of people here who know a great deal about many things. It’s really wonderful to have the stimulation through the day.
Vegas odds are not “lots of data.”
Lots of them are.
Anytime we win and Chris Paul and David West only have to play 32 min…i’m cool with that.
42, you dont know the opinion of the people betting. You dont have the underlying data, which describes value and volume of the bets. Without that information, you are seeing what the casino wants to show you.
And for the record, sports betting is so risky to both the house and the regulators that even though there is casino gambling in many states (more if you include tribal casinos) only Nevada has legal sports betting. (Oregon has a detached form of it with its lottery).
You don’t know single bets. You do know what they are paying out for each bet. You also know it’s essentially a zero-sum game. Thus, you can make an inference about the proportion of money on either side. You do not know how the money got there (1 monster bet on outcome A, or many small ones, etc.). Taking money as a measure of `sureness’ of the person placing the bet is reasonable. Assuming financial resources are independent of outcome selections allows you to make an inference about the public opinion.
As with anything, any one situation is not suitable for analysis, nor can you reason out what any one patron bet, but in the long run you can gain information from the performance.
And thats a far cry from
“Such economic devices are extremely good at gauging public perceptions” dont you think?
No. I think that’s exactly what the best such devices for gauging public opinion do.
It’s not as precise as some measuring devices are at measuring whatever it is they measure (consider lengthometers and length), but it’s better than an opinion poll, or a series of them, taken over time, asking `the same question’ over and over again in different ways.
Perhaps the sticking points here are
`extremely good’ meant by me is a relative term, rather than meaning it’s great and there will never be anything better because it just nails it every time.
public opinion is a vague notion of questionable quantifiability, and is dynamic to boot
Good discussion.
Your understanding of gambling science and social science are either really weak or you simply subjectively value things and call it true.
I repeat my earlier statement. There is no meaningful value is betting odds and using them as some gauge of who will win is no more valuable that a Tarot reading.
Consider mine repeated.
No need to assail my talents or knowledge.
I don’t know even know what “subjectively value things and call it true” means, really, but that’s ok. I don’t need to know.
I will tell you that my background is better than most. I can not say with certainty, however, how it compares in any fashion to yours.
I encourage you work out the math on the matter at your leisure.
I also rarely care what “public opinion” is. Go into Nola.com or ESPN.com comments sections if you want that drivel. I come here, hopefully, for people who are more educated on the sport than your average “public person.”
I tend to agree with you here. I don’t care what most people think.
Im going with 42 on this whole thing because i remember a conversation with him and i think “Statistics Major” came up. Ive taken stats and essentially what 42 is saying is sound. Assum people betting on sports have a basis of knowledge from which they make their bets and predictions. If you have 100 people who all kno basketball well, and 80% of them bet on the hornets winning, well that shows public opinion that the Hornets are teh better team overall and that they should win against the Warriors 80% of the time.
It most certainly guages public opinion because if you bet on something you damn sure have to believe you’re right.
Since you bring it up: Phd.
I was in string theory before that.
I’ve taught at a major university.
The data analysis, research, and risk assessments for the the space program keeps the lights on.
Your last point there is the a key assumption and a fairly solid one. A balanced payout on a line of, say, 7, on the super bowl means a good number of people think that favored team is . . . Favored. If it led to an uneven payout, a rational house would adjust the line to try to evn the money, etc. This last point is also key.
haha sorry about the confusion on youre schooling.
And just to clarify my schooling on this subject, i have a B in stats right now so there.
And yes i feel like we’re right 42! mainly u tho
I was in string theory before that.
Are you a True Believer in String Theory but needed a real job, or did you come to your senses?
Neither I think. Here’s the story, which folks can ignore:
My advisor took off after the storm, threatening my academics. I was already working in space, so I picked up in what I could get them to pay for: Stats. This wasn’t too bad since I had a Master’s which landed me the job to start with.
So, I came to my senses first.
As far as believing: As an imperfect model of reality, like Newton’s stuff, Einstein’s stuff, etc., it seems fine. It has not generated any single falsifiable hypothesis that is distinct from those of QFT etc. and GR (falsifiable by means and methods today), so it’s not scientific at this point, in the sense of Popper.
However, as a mathematical tool, it works well, and such maturing on paper is necessary to generate the falsifiable hypotheses needed to build science, whether good or bad. For instance, there are cute ways (way overkill) to show a torus is not a sphere with some of the `easy’ topological quantum field theory stuff out there. I can do this is with eyes or a fundamental group, however, and, frankly, that’s how I see the work at this point: A cute way to do less. I, however, am not privvy to all things stringy, just my dark corner of the world.
As a bonus: It seems that the string theories other there, as models of reality, are sort of samey-samey from a certain point of view. That point of view is called M-Theory. That was the latest and greatest when I last checked. It is 11-dimensional. I hope this brings someone a `do you like apples’ moment.
But Schmide234, if 80% of people bet on the Hornets winning a game, it does NOT mean that 80% people think the Hornets will win or even that the Hornets are a better team. It means that 80% of the people believe that given the odds (+3, -5, whatever) that they will win the BET.
And I think that is stormsurgephoto’s whole point. That Vegas odds are not about sports, they are about gambling. They don’t inform us about the game like stats such as Offensive Efficiency, PER, or TS%.
Yes. The information is about a large number of people’s opinion about the margin of victory of a team.
Yes. The information is about a large number of people’s opinion about the margin of victory of a team.
No! It’s about that large number of people’s opinion about the current point spread being offered by the bookie.
So, those are completely unrelated?
Someone who bets that the hornets will win by 3 does think the hornets have at least a remote chance of achieving a margin of victory of at least 3?
So, those are completely unrelated?
I’m sure that there’s a good correlation when the point spread is low.
Someone who bets that the hornets will win by 3 does think the hornets have at least a remote chance of achieving a margin of victory of at least 3?
That’s a buzzer-beating 3P shot. Effectively, it’s a straight-up bet.
With a larger point spread, the bettor might think the team will win, but by a lower margin.
It’s all incredibly fickle, depending on not only whether players are good, but — like the GSW game — when or if the winning team reinserts the starters.
Personally, I’d never bet the spread in basketball.
So there is information about the opinion of folks. Wonderful.
Man, I think the Hornets got more easy layups and fast break points in the first half then ALL season combined.
Trade Proposal: S. Curry for M. Williams teaches defense to the Warriors for 30 days during the offseason. Should be worth about 15+ more wins for the Warriors don’t you think? lol
Maddening win against the Warriors, but a win. I’ll take that, for sure.