Drama in Lakerland continues

Edit as of 4/10/2013 2:40pm

The drama continues, my model had the tiebreaker backwards, giving LA the advantage of the tie. Corrected values are at the bottom of the post.

The Lakers making the Playoffs or not has without a doubt been the most talked about conversation of the 2012-2013 season. And you would think that with just a handful of games to be played in the regular season we would finally have at definite answer or at least a pretty good idea.

But we would be forgetting this is LA/Hollywood we're talking about (I just know a movie is going to be made one day around this whole story).

So the Lakers currently have the 8th and final spot in the West (with a Laker win/Utah loss combination yesterday), half a game in front of Utah, but Utah has the tie-breaker in case the two teams end the season with same number of wins.

So what does the rest of the season look like? The experts have weighed in on NBA.com's blog but what do the stats say?

Running some new simulations based on the latest results, factoring the strength of the opponents and home game advantage for the last games, we have the following results:

Position	Lakers Probability	Mavericks Probability	Jazz Probability
7	0.4	NA	NA
8	73.7	6.5	19.4
9	20.3	17	62.7
10	5.6	76.5	17.9

Because I am more of a data-driven guy, I hereby declare the Lakers IN THE PLAYOFFS!!

4/10/2013 2:40pm
The drama continues, my model had the tiebreaker backwards, giving LA the advantage of the tie. When corrected, the Lakers playoffs drop to 50.1% !!
As a statistician I cannot pronounce myself with this value....

Here are the details:

Position	Lakers Probability	Mavericks Probability	Jazz Probability
7	0.6	NA	NA
8	50.1	7.1	42.2
9	39.3	18.1	42.6
10	10	74.8	15.2