Predictions are most of the time really not a sign of how much you know about basketball or if you do a good job or not. You never really know how the team will work together in the end. So why would we do predictions? Well, it is entertaining meaning that you can think about what all these smart people we worked with had to say.
We came up with a system that we can tell you the percentage the 24 journalists we asked about the regular season prediction of their teams.
Lets start with the luckiest or as we tend to call them smartest people regarding Euroleague Basketball. Make sure you remember the names of these journalists since they were right with their prediction 100%.
It probably wasn’t too hard to predict a good record for CSKA Moscow and Panathinaikos but to know before the season that both of them will have a record of 12 wins and 2 losses is great. Scire and Drazen from doubleteam.gr where right for Panathinaikos while felliow blogger Julien of the french Magazine REVERSE was right for CSKA Moscow.
Even more impressing for me is that Jaime Martinez Lafargue of the Spanish web site solobasket predicted a 9-5 record for FC Barcelona as well as Billy Kyriakidis of the buzzer beater was right with Aris TT Bank’s 7-7 record of the regular season. I did expect David Hein, who writes for Euroleague.net as well as FIBA.com, to give us a good prediction. His prediction was not only good – it was perfect for Partizan Belgrade with 6-8.
I won’t praise myself, but it has to be mentioned that I was 100% right with my prediction for Cibona Zagreb and a 4-10 record prediction.
These were the top experts of BallinEurope’s Euroleague 07/08 prediction. Lets see who was not so right – or even totally wrong.
The two worst predictions (106% and 117% wrong) come from Italy. Armani Jeans was predicted with 8-6, while Virtus Bologna was predicted 6-8. As I said in the beginning this has nothing to say with they actual knowledge about European basketball. You can see that they did not really expect those teams to do very well and I am sure nobody really thought that they would only win five games combined.
Honorable mentions: Nacho Dona of basket-me who predicted a 10-4 for Unicaja, Yarone Arbel of salnews with a 11-3 prediction for Maccabi Tel Aviv, Jonas Miklovas (basketnews) who predicted a 8-6 for Kaunas, Kerem Oktemus with his 6-8 prediction for Fenerbahce Istanbul, Eduardo Schell (marca) with a 9-5 record for Tau Ceramica and Evin Demirel who told us that Efes Pilsen will win 8 games and lose 6.
For our competition we have to say good bye to Federico del Prete of basketnet who did the Prediction for Armani, Jakub Wojczyski (Prokom Trefl), Sven Simon (Brose Baskets), Julien Deschuyteneer (Chroale Roanne), Christophe Blandin (Le Mans), Matej Bergant (Union Olimpija), Giuseppe Sciasci (Virtus Bologna) and myself (Cibona Zagreb).
As you probably already realized – they won’t be thrown out for bad predictions – their teams just did not qualify for the Top16.
I can’t wait to get the prediction of the other guys for the Top16!
Oh yes, just in case you want to see the exact number each journalist was wrong go to this google spreadsheet and you will find out that BallinEurope’s Christophe was wrong 64%. Good job man ..
