Pressure's On in LA

Well, somebody has been reading my blog...

But days after I rightfully got on Pierce's case pretty hard for his moronic comments and subsequent poor home performance "being a competitor," the Celtics responded by winning Game 4 and Game 5 pretty soundly (Pierce, in particular, played well).

In anticipation of tonight's game (and a potential Game 7), I revisted the home court data once again. Wait wait wait! Before you go running off screaming of my lack of creativity, let me defend myself! The previous analysis simply measured the proportion of wins by both teams playing at home vs playing away. Simply put, that analysis measured how many of the (hypothetical) 100 wins the higher seeds have had over the years were won at home (aka, the higher seed won 75 of their 100 wins at home and 25 on the road). Not only is that data inferentially incorrect tough to interpret, it's no longer really applicable considering the only two games left of the NBA Finals are at LA. So, below is all about win percentage, specifically, due to there only being 2 games left (both at LA), win percentage of the higher and lower seed while playing at the higher seed.

Total games played at higher seed: 26
Total wins of higher seed at home: 21
Total wins of lower seed away: 5
Higher seed win percentage at home: 21/26 or 80.8%
Lower seed win percentage away: 5/26 or 19.2%

Uh oh, Celtics. The lower seed is winning on the road an average of once every other year. Considering you already won on the road this NBA Finals in game 2, looks like you may have already used up all your luck.

But hey, I've been proved wrong many, many times, even in this series already, so you never know.

Last thing you need is an overreaction.