2019 Playoff Preview

So I fully intended to do a playoff preview similar to last year’s, but I just did not have the time, posting the year-end recap instead. (Which is a great read by the way, including some end-of-season awards, so check it out if you haven’t, especially if you did not make the playoffs.)

But the good news is that while I didn’t have time to do a full write-up, I’ve got the audio book version for you instead. Just as I did last year, I did the same level of research, diving deep into the seasons, rosters and championship odds of each of the six playoff teams, simulating the entire playoffs 10,000 times to determine the probability of each team advancing to each round. But instead of writing it all up, Alex and I recorded a podcast instead.

And it’s a beast. Approximately 90 minutes long where we spend about 15 minutes on each team owner, counting down from the longest shot to win a championship (Samantha) to the heavy favorite (Josh). Several times in the podcast, we make reference to the playoff chances for each team. Here is that data below:

As you’ll see, Josh is the favorite with a 41% chance to win his first championship. How does that compare to last year? Alex’s Thanos team, which was even better than Josh’s this year, had just a 38% chance to win the whole thing. And that’s actually kinda remarkably high considering he didn’t have the first-round bye that Josh has.

If you go back and look at last year’s post, you’ll see that we calculated the odds of Alex winning the championship if we had re-seeded the playoffs to give him the 1 seed and his chances jumped to 49%. So by comparison, Josh is not that much of a favorite. But given the first-round bye, he may be more effective in getting the job done than Alex last year who was upset in the first round by Samantha.

Alright, that’s it for me. Everything else you need to know is in the pod. Enjoy!

We dive deep into the playoffs, and pick our winners.