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[QUOTE="pokercuse08, post: 4991649, member: 6535"]
Regarding the luck factor, perhaps this poker analogy will help. If you get it all-in with AA vs 22, you're 82%. So if you win the pot, you actually got "lucky" to win 100%. Or the better way to put it, you outperformed your expected pot share. If you got it in five times in that scenario, you'd expect to lose (roughly) one pot.

In sports, if you go into a game with a 75% chance to win and do win, you got "lucky" by .25 wins. If you play four such games and win all four, you got "lucky" by a full win.

Likewise if you have three 50-50 games, you're going to get lucky or unlucky because you cannot possibly split them 1.5 to 1.5.

Now, where the efficiency numbers can be misleading is that a computer is going to look at a basket of games that were +/- 2 points, and say you should win roughly half of them. So it's going to count a game that was close the whole way that finished within 2 points the same as one where you had a 20 point lead and hung on by 2. By the eye test, those wins are not equal.

So a team that has a bunch of the second type of games is going to look "lucky" on KenPom. It may mean they actually were! Maybe they just caught some lucky bounces this year in close games, the calls went their way, etc. That's going to happen to a handful of teams. But maybe the data is just not giving a good representation.

I'd argue in our case the data is not giving a good representation.
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