An introduction to this blog and the analytical process

I'm sure this sounds strange coming from someone writing about the sport, but I'm not a huge supporter of the NBA. I used to be a fan in the early days of Shaq and the mid-90's Bulls, but the game today is different and the talent pool, to me at least, seems watered down and borderline unwatchable until the postseason.

I was a 10-year-old kid when the Dream Team walloped the Olympic competition in Barcelona during the summer of 1992 en route to a gold medal. I don't remember specifics, but I was amazed at how dominant the team was.

As a 10-year-old, I was thinking more about slam dunks and no-look passes, not the historical context of the team or analytics.

Today, I'm a baseball writer and probably a bit too obsessed with sabermetrics and comparing today's greatest teams to those of yesteryear. I use statistical analysis to make most of my arguments, but I've also found it's fun to play out "what-if" scenarios using computer simulators such as Diamond Mind Baseball and Strat-O-Matic.

With the Olympics on the horizon and another incarnation of USA Basketball set to the hit the court, I am interested in finding out how the 1992 Dream Team compares to more recent versions of Team USA.

The folks at Strat-O-Matic graciously set me up with the basketball game for Windows and several season disks to build each of USA's six Olympic basketball rosters dating back to the Dream Team in 1992.

For the first part of this study, each of the six USA Olympic basketball teams will play a 28-game schedule against teams from an entirely different year. The 28 games are broken down into four seven-game series against the two conference winners, the worst team in the league based on winning percentage, and a team based on the end-of-season All-NBA selections.

Phase One Schedule
1992 USA: '04 Spurs, '04 Pistons, '04 Hawks, '04 All-NBA
1996 USA: '08 Lakers, '08 Magic, '08 Kings, '08 All-NBA
2000 USA: '12 Heat, '12 Spurs, '12 Magic, '12 All-NBA
2004 USA: '92 Bulls, '92 Suns, '92 Mavericks, '92 All-NBA
2008 USA: '96 Bulls, '96 Jazz, '96 Grizzlies, '96 All-NBA
2012 USA: '00 76ers, '00 Lakers, '00 Bulls, '00 All-NBA

This setup of 28 games will allow for a baseline of performance before phase two where the six USA Olympic basketball teams will face each other in an extended round-robin tournament.

I'm not entirely sure of how I'm going to document each contest here, but the software will maintain detailed statistics and boxscores.

For sanity purposes, I'm only going to simulate one series at a time. Things may change a bit once the project gets underway, but I'm excited about the data collection and an interesting new way to compare the 1992 Dream Team to other USA Olympic cohorts.

I may never be able to confirm the overwhelming opinion that the Dream Team was the best basketball team ever assembled, but I'm going to have some fun in evaluating the premise and creating a footnote in the argument.