Mailbag! LeBron's 3 HOF Careers, Planning For Ovechkin's Record, Hoosier Losses and Head-to-Head QBs
It's time for a long-overdue answering of reader questions.
I haven’t typically been very good about doing posts where I answer reader questions, but with a number of them landing on my desk at once, I figured now was the perfect time to do a proper mailbag here at the ol’ Substack.
1. LeBron’s HOF Triple Crown
Our first item comes courtesy of Ben, who shares some research done in response to Klay Thompson marveling at the fact that his 16,000th point only brought him a little more than one-third of the way toward LeBron James’ all-time record total.
This is less of a question and more of a sharing of cool results, so take it away, Ben:
This is inspired by Bill James and Klay Thompson.
Bill James was once asked if Rickey Henderson was a Hall of Famer. He responded that if you split him into two, he'd be two Hall of Famers.
After Klay's quote, I got to thinking about it. Klay is likely a Hall of Famer, but he has less than 40% of Lebron in points and 25% of his All Star appearances. It got me thinking that if you split Lebron into 3, he'd likely be 3 Hall of Famers. So I decided to go ahead and do that.
Assign his rookie season to Lebron 1, his second season to Lebron 2, 3rd to Lebron 3, 4th to Lebron 1 and so on. Then I went ahead and used Basketball Reference's Hall of Fame probability model and applied it to the 3 Lebrons. (I assumed Lebron would make the All-Star Game this year and maintain his position on the Assist leaderboard.)
All three turn out to be easy 1st ballot HOFers and top 60 all time! I didn't split into 4 LeBrons, but even with the short careers, they'd probably have a decent shot in the model.
2. When Will Ovi Break The Record???
Next up, we have Maya, who lives in D.C. and is hoping to have a very special ticket on her hands.
I'm going to a Caps game on March 18. Odds it could be the Ovi record breaking game, you think?
I’ve written a few times already this season about Alex Ovechkin pursuing Wayne Gretzky’s all-time scoring mark of 894 goals, but you can never do too much on such a special record. In those earlier cases, I used Ovi’s goals-per-game averages from different time periods — this season, the past 3 years, his career — to track when he might break the record if he maintains that steady pace:
As you can see, Ovechkin’s rate has slowed since that last update, with his 3-year pace not good enough to break the record in 2024-25, and his other rates cutting things a lot closer. So it already seems like Ovi will be a lot further from the record when Maya goes to the game than we might have thought a few weeks ago.
But Maya’s question is more about the odds of her game being on the day a record goal happens. So for that purpose, I took a weighted combination of Ovi’s scoring stats from the past three seasons (with more recent seasons getting more weight), and created an adjusted Poisson distribution around his odds of scoring any given number of goals in each given game.1 Then I simulated the rest of Washington’s schedule 5,000 times and tracked what days Ovi tended to break the record on (if he broke it at all):
The bad news for hockey fans everywhere (including the ever-gracious Gretzky) is that Ovi is more likely than not to fall short this year and need the start of next season to reach the record. He tied the record in 35.2 percent of sims, breaking it 27.5 percent of the time.
The bad news for Maya specifically is that, even in the simulations when Ovi does get to Gretzky, he does it on April 7 on average — nearly 3 weeks after her game. (He ends her game with 884.9 career goals, on average.)
The good news, though? There is at least some chance Ovi can buck the overall trend and make history for Maya. Specifically, he broke or tied the record in March 18’s game 0.82 percent of the time in our simulations, outright pulling ahead in 0.48 percent of the sims.
So it could happen! And even if not, Ovi scored at least one goal 40 percent of the time in Maya’s game against the Red Wings on March 18, meaning she may at least be able to say she saw one of the final few goals leading up to the magical Nos. 894 and 895.
3. How Many Blowouts Disqualify a Tourney Team?
Longtime reader Dan from New York, whose son happens to attend IU, asks:
Here’s my Indiana question for you. What’s the most blowout losses that any at-large team has ever had? Is there a point where it just becomes disqualifying no matter what else you do (other than get an auto bid)?
Dan’s referring to the fact that the Indiana Hoosiers men’s basketball team — which at one point was ranked 14th in the nation — just recorded its fourth loss of at least 15 points (and third loss of at least 25 points) when it got ran out of Assembly Hall by Illinois last week, 94-69. The surprising good news for IU, though, is that at least some power-conference teams have still made the tourney despite posting as many blowout losses as the Hoosiers:
Shockingly, none of these teams even needed a conference tournament title to sneak in, either. But they did need to show out in their other games — something Indiana hasn’t necessarily done, with a 1-4 record against BPI Top 50 teams.
The other factor that may end up disqualifying the Hoosiers is not their number of huge losses as much as the average lopsidedness of their losses overall. No power team since 2002-03 has made the tourney with an average margin of defeat of -20.0 or worse; Virginia got in with a -19.2 PPG margin in its losses in 2023-24. As of Wednesday afternoon (before they played Northwestern), Indiana’s average margin of loss was -22.2.
4. Most Common Playoff QB Battles
Finally, let’s wrap things with a question from Harry, who wanted to know which quarterback pairings had faced most often in the NFL playoffs (in the context of the looming Patrick Mahomes vs. Josh Allen Part IV). I ended up posting about this on Notes the other day, but I wanted to include it here as well, in case anyone missed it over there:
I find the list fascinating — even though it only extends back to the 1970 AFL-NFL merger, so it misses matchups like Otto Graham versus Bobby Layne (who faced in the 1952, 1953 and 1954 NFL title games) or Bart Starr’s frequent battles with Y.A. Tittle and Don Meredith.
During the modern era, Brady versus (Peyton) Manning is unsurprisingly the most common head-to-head QB matchup in the playoffs, though it might surprise some to learn that Manning actually ended up ahead of his rival on wins, 3-2, despite developing a reputation for not being able to beat Brady after losing the first two faceoffs. Another shocker? Just how often Joe Flacco appears on the list, tangling with Ben Roethlisberger three times and playing Brady to a draw (2 wins apiece!) in their four showdowns. It seems to have been completely forgotten how much of a postseason fixture Flacco was in the first half of his career.
Anyway, hopefully this mailbag had a little bit of something for everyone. If you have your own mailbag questions, hit me up here, and hopefully we can make this more of a regular feature going forward!
Filed under: Miscellany, Mailbag
Specifically, I blended Ovi’s observed frequencies of scoring with that which we would expect from the Poisson distribution.
Why does Ovi's odds go DOWN from one game to the next a few times (notably March 9th to 11th)? Strength of opponent?