Thursday, March 13, 2008

Stat bag: Third quarter scoring since the end of the winning streak

I'm not one of those hardcore stat guys. I'm not nearly smart enough to look at numbers for longer than a few minutes, but I do like perusing through the integer side of the game every now and then. And since I've got nothing to do before the start of tonight's game against Sac-town, I thought I'd look into a question that "natedogg" asked in the comments section of this post. Natedogg asks ...
... how many points have we been out-scored by in the third quarter since we finished our streak of 17 of 18 in January?

Well, we've played 30 games since the 17 out of 18 streak ended back on January 13 against the Raptors. We've been outscored in the third quarter in 16 of those games, outscored our opponent in 11 games, and tied in the third quarter three times. All in all, the Trail Blazers are -62 in the third quarters of games since the end of the streak. Suffice to say that the Red and Black haven't been stellar over the past two months in the third frame.

But lets go a little deeper. In those 30 games, the Blazers have won five times when winning the third quarter, but they've also won five times when losing the third quarter. They've lost six times when winning the third and 11 times when losing the third. Confused yet?

What does all this mean? I have no idea. It's obvious that they've lost more often than not in the last 30 games when they lose the third quarter, so we can probably extrapolate that out to declare that winning the third quarter is a good thing, though we probably didn't need any numbers to back up that claim.

Can any of you readers out there wrap a definitive statement out of these third quarter numbers? If so, lets here it.

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