The Flaw of the Quotient System (and Points For/Against)
Is the Quotient System really the best thing we have to determine the better team?
At the end of the UAAP Boys’ Basketball round one, we witnessed a three-way tie between Adamson, FEU, and NU as all ended up with a 6-1 record and each had a 1-1 record between each other.
Per UAAP tiebreaker rules, should this happen, the next way to settle the tiebreaker is to use the quotient system.
You can look up what the quotient system means online, but here’s a Pong Ducanes tweet that should help you understand how the quotient system works.
The number on the left is how many points the team scored against the other two teams (or points for), while the number on the right is how many points the team gave up against the other two teams (or points against).
But only accounting for a team’s points for and against to assess whether a team is better than the other is not enough. We need to account for their pace.
I could go on and on about explaining why we need pace but I found a perfect medium article that answers this question. Here’s the link if you want to read the full article but the picture below is enough to understand what I mean.
At this point, you should now understand why we need to account for pace, now we need a metric that uses points for/against that also accounts for pace.
Luckily, we have what we call a team’s Offensive Rating, Defensive Rating, and Net Rating. You can click the link to see the formula and definitions of the said metrics but you can think of it this way.
Offensive Rating is how many points a team will score if they had 100 possessions.
Defensive Rating is how many points a team will give up if their opponent had 100 possessions.
Net Rating is how will a team perform if they and their opponent had 100 possessions.
Using the following metrics gives better context to determining the better team because it accounts for pace of play and quality of possessions.
So the next time you see or read someone saying, “Team A has the best offense because they had the highest point scored in the league”, you’ll know that statement lacks context because they haven’t accounted for pace.
On The Fly will also use the three metrics to rank teams in our power rankings.