Warriors Given 76-Percent Chance Of Beating Thunder In Western Finals
MERCED (KCBS) -- If you are placing any bets on the NBA finals, there's a professor in Merced who has a pretty good success rate in picking basketball series winners who might have the inside track for you.
"Over 80-percent successful in predicting the winners of a series," Harish Bhat, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics & Natural Sciences at UC Merced told KCBS.
Bhat and his team mine all the play-by-play data from every regular season, and post-season game to make predictions based an algorithm.
"It's gotten us down to the point where we can simulate an entire NBA season thousands of times in just a few minutes," Bhat said.
The algorithm crunches data on who passed the ball to who, lineups, substitutions, and accounts for variables like home court advantage.
But, Bhat says there are still limitations.
"There's no way to say whether the players will play as they did in the past," Bhat said.
Bhat tweets the predictions out daily. He predicts the Warriors have a 76-percent chance of beating the Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, and would be very surprised if the Cavaliers don't make it to the finals.
No predictions on the Championship just yet.