Can the 2019-202 Lakers get 70 wins?

I know I know, it's way too early to have this conversation.
If we're already having it with less than a third of the season under our belts, can you imagine what it will be like for the rest of the way? "70" might be a top Google search in 2020!

That being said, the conversation has already started, here's the record for the '71 Lakers, blablabla, very similar, blablabla... So it's difficult to block it out entirely and as a big fan of visualization, even more difficult not to add a couple of visuals to avoid all the number comparisons we're seeing.

Very quick background: the NBA regular season consists of 82 games. 70 was a mythical number of wins no team seemed able to reach, the Lakers getting the closest with 69 in 1972. That all changed in 1996 when Michael Jordan's Bulls went on to win 72. Twenty years later, the Golden State Warriors were able to inch just a bit further with 73 wins which is the record as of today. (People will routinely point out that while the Bulls won the championship that year, the Warriors lost the Finals in 7 games...). The year after they got 72 wins, the Bulls were close to repeating the 70-win feat but lost their last two games and ended at 69. They did however win the championship again that year.

This year, the Los Angeles Lakers are off to a really hot start, and after the Bucks' loss yesterday, lead the NBA with a 24-3 record. This hot start has naturally fueled the 70-win conversation, so how do all these teams stack up at this point of the regular season?

Here's a game-by-game evolution of those four teams' win percentages:

The gray horizontal line is 83.4% representing the 70 win threshold. What really stands out here is the overall downward trend as the season progresses. It took a while for the '71 to get above the 70-win threshold , but once above it seems a very difficult level to maintain. No team was just under the limit to finally make it above in the final stretch of the season.

While the Lakers are currently tied with the '95 Bulls, '96 Bulls and '71 Lakers, they will need to keep accumulating wins at a higher than 83.4% win rate to provide an acceptable cushion for the downward end of year trend.

As for the rationale behind that downward trend, it could be due to fatigue, although one could argue that all teams should be similarly affected, but more likely it is due to final Playoff standings starting to fit in. The 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th seed are all fighting for the last two Playoff spots and will do whatever it takes to win.

It could very well be that LeBron and company will have to make some late season decisions as to whether they want to pursue the 70-win mark or maximize their chances for title. Officially they'll declare the latter as being their priority, but we all know that if LeBron can add a 70-win season to his resume he wouldn't spit on that. He also knows first-hand the risk associated with chasing the wrong priority, as his team was the one who beat the 73-win Warriors....

Lego: Christmas gift without bricking the bank

Four years ago right around Christmas time, I had posted an analysis of how the prices of Lego sets were related to their number of pieces.

Checking a Lego Christmas catalog last week, I had the feeling that:

1. prices had gone up in general
2. yet the 10-pieces-per-dollar ratio I had estimated 4 years ago still appeared to be valid.

This conclusion would then naturally be that the number of pieces had also gone up.

I pulled all the prices and number of pieces by Lego theme (over 40 nowadays!), and revisited the analysis.

The data needed some clean-up again, especially regarding sets with with abnormal prices for the number of pieces: the Duplo sets (oversized blocks are much more expensive), the Mindstorms sets (the color sensor is over $40) and Powered-Up sets (the move hub is $80). Similarly to last time, I also split themes into those that are based on an external partnership (Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel, DC...) and those entirely developed by Lego (City, Friends, Creator Expert...).

Here's the plot of pieces versus price for all sets less than $200 (95% of sets), and removing the outliers mentioned in the previous paragraph:

It's quite tempting to look at the range for the pieces-to-price ratio across sets, splitting by theme:

Out of the top 10 themes with best median ratio, 9 are themes Lego developed in-house, and only one is through external partnership (car makers, deal might not have been as lucrative as for Marvel or Star Wars rights).

We can fit a linear model to fit the number of pieces against price, partnership, and their interaction:

The result is that for non-partnership sets, we get a pieces-to-price ratio of approximately 10.7, ratio that drops to just over 9 for the partnership sets. The difference is highly significant and confirms our previous observations. The intercepts are slightly different but not significantly so.

A question we might be interested in is whether we observe any diminishing or increasing returns as the prices go up. This can be done by observing the pieces-to-price ratio for various pice buckets:

As we might have expected, our pieces-to-price improves as we go into the more expensive sets. This makes sense as the pieces are only one of the costs for sets, there are many other fixed costs in terms of packaging and marketing that will make the smaller sets less attractive to the smart buyer.
Non-partnership sets appear to always outperform the partnership sets, but one should keep in mind that the sample size is pretty small in the $200+ bucket.
The previous result also throws some shade on our linear models, the slopes (pieces-to-price ratio) are actually not constant. If we wanted to improve the models, we would probably need to include a quadratic term for price.

So to recap, your best pieces per dollar will come from non-partnership and bigger sets. Of course it could be your child has a specific theme in mind, so to help out with your Christmas purchases, here's the list of the best sets for each theme:

Theme	Product Name	Pieces	Price	Ratio
Architecture	trafalgar-square	1197	79.99	14.96
Boost	droid-commander	1177	199.99	5.89
Brickheadz	thanksgiving-scarecrow	177	9.99	17.72
City	pizza-van	249	19.99	12.46
Classic	bricks-bricks-bricks	1500	59.99	25.00
Creator-3-in-1	deep-sea-creatures	230	14.99	15.34
Creator-Expert	taj-mahal	5923	369.99	16.01
Dc	1989-batmobile	3306	249.99	13.22
Disney	the-disney-castle	4080	349.99	11.66
Disney-Frozen-2	elsa-s-magical-ice-palace	701	79.99	8.76
Duplo	creative-fun	120	39.99	3.00
Fantastic-Beasts	newt-s-case-of-magical-creatures	694	49.99	13.88
Friends	underwater-loop	389	29.99	12.97
Harry-Potter	hogwarts-castle	6020	399.99	15.05
Hidden-Side	shrimp-shack-attack	579	49.99	11.58
Ideas	lego-nasa-apollo-saturn-v	1969	119.99	16.41
Juniors	city-central-airport	376	49.99	7.52
Jurassic-World	jurassic-park-t-rex-rampage	3120	249.99	12.48
Lego-Batman-Sets	1989-batmobile	3306	249.99	13.22
Lego-Spider-Man	spider-mech-vs-venom	604	49.99	12.08
Marvel	the-hulkbuster-smash-up	375	29.99	12.50
Mindstorms	lego-mindstorms-ev3	601	349.99	1.72
Minecraft	the-wool-farm	260	19.99	13.01
Minifigures	mf-set-ninjago-2019	59	12.99	4.54
Ninjago	ninjago-city	4867	299.99	16.22
Overwatch	dorado-showdown	419	29.99	13.97
Power-Functions	lego-power-functions-train-motor	7	13.99	0.50
Powered-Up	disney-train-and-station	2925	329.99	8.86
Powerpuff-Girls	mojo-jojo-strikes	228	29.99	7.60
Serious-Play	window-exploration-bag	4900	484.99	10.10
Speed-Champions	formula-e-panasonic-jaguar-racing	565	29.99	18.84
Star-Wars	yoda	1771	99.99	17.71
Stranger-Things	the-upside-down	2287	199.99	11.44
Technic	cherry-picker	155	9.99	15.52
The-Lego-Movie-2	pop-up-party-bus	1024	79.99	12.80
The-Lego-Ninjago-Movie	ninjago-city	4867	299.99	16.22
Toy-Story-4	woody-rc	69	9.99	6.91
Unikitty	unikitty-cloud-car	126	9.99	12.61
Xtra	traffic-lights	46	3.99	11.53

Now one important caveat should be mentioned here. Number of pieces is a great proxy for size and time to build, but it isn't perfect. Going through some sets I've noticed a tendency of adding more and more small decorative pieces. This trick can significantly and artificially bump up the piece number. Ideally we should also include weight to control for that aspect, but weight was not available and would probably not have been available at the desired granularity level. Take the new gingerbread house for instance. At $99 for 1477 pieces it seems like a great deal, but take a closer look at what's inside:

Look at all those small pieces! Especially the red and white candy canes around the doors and windows. Just tiny 1-by-1 round shapes staked together. Almost 100 of them, and I doubt they're worth $10!

Now of course, these were just models, and you can throw them all out the window when it comes Ole Kirk's house. Who? Ole Kirk as in Ole Kirk Christiansen, the man who created The Lego Company. His house is an extremely rare Lego set which was gifted only to employees (and a few special visitors). At 912 pieces we would roughly estimate it at $90, but good luck finding it at less than $300, prices of $500 are not uncommon for unopened sets!