We are usually, even when going a week or two without posting, working hard on perfecting features already deployed, on developing new features, and of course on preparing for future Reports.
Here are some highlights of recent work going on behind the scenes for high level basketball managers and watchers. Remember, there are dozens of other features here at Quest that have been developed long before these recent ones.
QUEST FOR THE RING LIVE GAME BLOGGING
We have changed our live game blogging host from Twitter to Tumblr. As with Twitter, the live game posts will appear not only on the new Quest Tumblr Page but also right on this home page, way down near the bottom of this page. So if you miss the live blogging as I would imagine most of you will, you can always come here to find out what upcoming Report previews were made and what lunacy transpired during the game. Remember, these live blogs are only 3/4 serious but raw and unedited, and 1/4 more or less lunacy. But I warn you, there is some truth hidden in some of the lunacy.
We live blogged a few games during 2009 at Twitter under the name "Questforthering". But Twitter turned out to be a big mistake. Apparently, Twitter is undercapitalized or has bad management, because they are actually stopping people from posting to their micro blogs if they make more than a few dozen postings in an hour. This is an unpublished "rule" which is apparently subject to change from day to day.
Keep in mind that you can only post up to 140 characters in a "tweet" at Twitter, roughly 30 words or so. And yet Twitter is cutting people off after roughly 50 tweets, or in other words after roughly 1,500 words, the size of a moderately long newspaper article. So Twitter has obviously become nothing more than a joke, and we are going to have nothing more to do with them.
We deleted the account. We were able to save some but not all of our Tweets, so technically this is the first time in history that an Internet site has been so badly managed that we lost content.
Please do yourself a favor and do not fall into the "Twitter trap". That site is garbage unless you are a celebrity, in which case no doubt you are never stopped from tweeting no matter how many tweets you make.
Just as Quest for the Ring is a lower traffic and sort of a secret site on the Internet, there are always such sites for every other possible application and subject. So we hunted for alternatives for Twitter and found numerous ones. For almost every subject, there are countless sites that are better than the site at the "top of the heap" traffic wise. Google these days is missing much of the internet, partly because of the size of the Internet and partly because Goolge policies heavily favor sites started before 2000.
We chose one of the most popular of the non-Twitter micro blog formats: Tumblr. Unfortunately, we don't have resources to do more than about one live game blog per month. Post links to Quest for the Ring if you want this site to get more traffic and get more production time assigned to it. (But there is an untouchable minimum production regardless of traffic which is more production than most other sites written by a very small staff.)
THE QUEST FOR THE RING TOOLBOX
The Quest Toolbox Site was recently improved dramatically and anyone can now go there and in a very short time calculate Real Player Ratings for anyone they have data for. About ten days ago, the embedded yet interactive spreadsheet (a true state of the art Internet application if there ever was one) was, like many state of the art things, not working correctly. But as of today, it is working fantastically. Try it, you will not be disappointed.
There is a Toolbox User Guide right there on the page.
THE QUEST FOR THE RING INJURIES MONITOR PAGE
It's considered rude to say it, but the truth is that injuries or the lack of them often decide who wins playoff games (and regular season games).
All sports sites run by large corporations and a few run by a small number of medium sized corporations have what are supposed to be continually updated NBA injuries rundowns. These injury monitor pages do not draw a lot of visitors, and yet they are in theory among the most important pages for someone wanting to truly keep up with the real NBA situation and to know in advance how a game or a series is likely to go.
The problem is that the NBA injury situation is very hard to keep up with, both because it is always changing from day to day and because there is no law or League rule that says that teams must be truthful and timely about their injury situations. Some teams will by accident or sometimes intentionally give out misleading or inadequate information about their injury situation. The injuries themselves are often confusing to the team medical staffs, and there is often some uncertainty about how severe an injury is and about how long it will be until a player returns to the court.
Furthermore, some of the injury monitor pages are set up editorially smarter than others, and some have more day to day update work going into them than others.
The bottom line to all of this is that despite the fact that injuries are so important to determining who wins and who loses, finding out exactly what the injury situation is is a dicey proposition.
Until now. Now you can go to the Quest for the Ring Injuries Site and see in one place six different NBA injury rundowns by team. There is at the moment no User Guide for this, so we introduce one right here....
There are five injury rundowns provided by five different media companies and there are links to the official team injury reports that are part of what I call "team situation PDFs". These PDFs are little known goldmines of information about teams provided by people working for those teams, and there are links to the PDFs of ten 2010 contending teams on the Quest Injuries page. Eventually links to all 30 teams' PDFs will be available on that page.
What you do when you want to know which team is up and which team is down due to injuries is go to Quest for the Ring Injuries and start reviewing the various injury breakdowns, starting from the top. Often there is no need to review more than the first two or three rundowns. If there is a disagreement between two or more sources regarding one or more injury statuses as quite honestly there very often will be, you should do one or more of the following:
(1) Review four or five of the "source windows".
(2) Click the link to the official team situation PDF and see the injury report there. Whenever there is disagreement between the media sources, it is usually safe to rely on what the team PDF says as correct.
(3) If no source is saying a player will play (by not listing him in the injury report) assume the worst of the various reports is correct unless the most negative one is heavily outnumbered. For example, if when describing whether a player is going to play or not one source is saying doubtful, another source is saying questionable (which is slightly less pessimistic than doubtful) and another source is saying probable, assume the player is not going to play. The exception to that is if there is one media source saying a player is out but the other four are saying the player is probable. If and only if the probable heavily outnumbers the doubtful will I assume the player will play.
(4) If you see a player listed as probable or questionable or doubtful on one or two sources but you don't see that player listed at all on the other three or four sources, assume the player will play. Remember, when a player does not appear on the list, it is because there is supposed to be no injury and the player is supposed to be able to play.
You see what I mean: this injury stuff is more complicated than the average man on the street knows, and there is both an art (that I have taught you here) and a science (the information on the Injuries page) involved to guessing correctly in advance who is going to play and who is not.
THE QUEST FOR THE RING OVERTIME SITE
The Quest for the Ring used to take as long as 90 seconds to load even with a fast cable broadband connection. We decided recently to make 60 seconds the maximum load time. We have a site where we can find out exactly how long the page takes to load, and we will monitor that from time to time to make sure our page never takes more than 60 seconds to completely and totally load.
We had to move out several great features from the home page. We put them on a new Quest for the Ring Overtime Site.
FINALLY! CUSTOM CHARTS AND GRAPHS COME TO QUEST FOR THE RING
Is there any gizmo that has not yet appeared on Quest for the Ring? Believe or not, there are a few nice gizmos that have still never appeared on this site. One of which until now was a custom graph or chart. We finally got around to finding a resource we can use to make graphs and charts. It's surprising it took so long to introduce graphs given that Quest for the Ring uses custom designed statistics extensively.
Graphs and charts bolster our custom statistical products and let you see at a glance for example exactly how well players are doing. I mean, you can see at a glance with just numbers but somehow a graph or a chart make the numbers more compelling and easier to interpret. With graphs and charts, it is easier than ever to compare a team from one year to the next, to compare the seasons of a player, and to compare one team to another in the here and now.
Here is our first chart, which shows you the Denver Nuggets Real Player Ratings for 2008-09 as a whole and for 2009-10 through February 4, 2010. You can at a glance see how much better or how much worse a player is from last year to this year. (A player plotted at zero for one of the two years means that player did not play for the Nuggets that year.)
With this particular chart that you see below, you can see at a glance that George Karl is a complete idiot for not playing Reynaldo Balkman for at least 16 and preferably about 20 minutes a game this season.
In the chart you can at a glance see that Balkman in 2008-09 was a better player than Kenyon Martin in either 2008-09 or 2009-10. Yes, it's really true, yet the office politics of the Nuggets and of George Karl in particular means it is impossible to recognize that Kenyon Martin is not the untouchable superstar they falsely believe he is. I mean, if Reynaldo Balkman is at least as good as and probably better than Kenyon Martin, then exactly how good is Kenyon Martin? Not as good as George Karl and the Nuggets think, and not as good as Lamar Odom, Pau Gasol, and Andrew Bynum by the way either.
For more information about what is probably George Karl's biggest blunder for the current season, see this Report and this Report.
In a report coming in the near future, we will have our first team to team comparison graph; most likely Lakers versus Nuggets. It's going to be another in a long series of improvements to the closer and closer to perfect Real Player Rating system.
The yellow is 2008-09 and the red is 2009-10. I am aware that it is hard to read the player names and future graphs and charts will be easier to read if at all possible.
Here is the evaluation scale:
Perfect for all Practical Purposes / Major Historic Super Star 1.100 and more
Historic Super Star 1.000 1.099
Super Star 0.910 0.999
A Star Player / A Well Above Normal Starter 0.830 0.909
Very Good Player / A Solid Starter 0.760 0.829
Major Role Player / Good Enough to Start 0.700 0.759
Good Role Player / Often a Good 6th Man 0.650 0.699
Satisfactory Role Player 0.590 0.649
Marginal Role Player 0.530 0.589
Poor Player 0.470 0.529
Very Poor Player 0.400 0.469
Extremely Poor Player and less 0.399
