In case you missed the first 4 parts of “Playoffs are a Crapshoot”, here they are:
Last year the Braves won 97 games. But we know that this record is partly skill and partly luck. We also know the aggregate contribution of luck and skill across all teams. But there is no way to precisely to assign the actual influence of luck and skill to any particular team’s results. But we can make an intelligent guess, and we call this guess regression to the mean.
As we said last time, we know that the variance induced by luck is 6.