Good-looking reader (/good-reading looker) of the internet, welcome to your Preseason Starts Today! hype story.
It starts like this: The Bucks have not had a winning preseason record since I started covering the team in 2007-08. Enough about me. The Bucks have not had a winning preseason record since the Karl Administration, back in 2002-03.
The seeming randomness of preseason makes that statistically improbable. But are preseason records random at all?
(Preseason Records Are Hard To Find)
Sidenote: On the internet, you can easily find how many miles per 48 minutes JaKarr Sampson ran last season, but tracking down preseason win-loss records from before 2002 is much more difficult. The good people of the Bucks PR department shared some data with me. And I filled in the rest via old Milwaukee Journal Sentinel archives. These numbers should be right, or very close to it. If there is somewhere with preseason records of all NBA teams, that would be nice.
Perfect Preseason
Just looking at the chart, you can see that the lines seem to like to follow each other a bit.
Take the title-winning 1970-71 team for example. The Bucks went a franchise-best 66-16 in the regular season, and that was preceded by a 10-0 preseason mark (which included a 45-point win over Atlanta in Nashville and a 27-point win over Cleveland in Bowling Green to conclude the exhibition season).
Then they went 0-8 in the 1976-77 preseason and followed that up with a 30-52 mark in the regular season, their worst record in the first 24 years of the franchise excluding their inaugural season.
True, that 7-0 record in 1997-98 did not propel Jerald Honeycutt, Andrew Lang, and company to a deep playoff run.
Moderate Positive Correlation
Yet based on 47 seasons worth of Bucks data, there has been a “moderate positive correlation,” which means there is a “tendency for high X variable scores go with high Y variable scores (and vice versa).” At least that is according to the Pearson Correlation Coefficient Calculator, where I dropped all the numbers.
As we are already quite mathematical here today, now is exactly the time to note that correlation does not imply causation.
No matter how the Bucks fare in the preseason this year, it is hard to imagine it will have any predictive power for the regular season. The schedule has been cut to six games. Key players rounding back into form from injury such as Jabari Parker are unlikely to get (too) much time.
The Bucks have not had a winning preseason record in the last 12 years. Maybe this will be more of a postseason team anyway.