Sports fans and their accompanying websites become so wrapped up in the day-to-day happenings, stories, games, goings-on, quips, statements, and logo changes, that they often lose track of the big picture. It’s easy to become so focused on the details and the minutiae of the sports life cycle that the global perspective becomes lost entirely — everyone knows that tired cliché about forests and trees. It’s like global warming: It’s hard for the citizens of Northeast Ohio to remember that there’s a disturbing trend of each successive year being one of the hottest on record while they’re freezing their figurative balls off in frigid zero-degree February weather. To combat the habit of sweating the small stuff, WFNY is introducing the Cleveland Sports Championship Watch. The mission: To take stock of where Cleveland sports teams stand at any point in the year — or at least any point in the year that not-so-discreet websites will furnish the terms of wagering on Cleveland’s major sports teams.
Models and forecasts for how seasons will unfold and how teams will perform have now flooded the market. A lot of groups and individuals have put a lot of thought into trying to predict the future, with varying degrees of success. No one model embodies anything close to perfection. Despite these respectable efforts, the most reliable projections probably still come from bookmakers, the metaphorical “Vegas” that allows individuals to wager on a team’s success. Vegas generally needs to be more intelligent than the collective betting public to make money, which they do with great success. Its odds also tend to reflect the opinions and perceptions of the both the ordinary citizenry and the smartest gamblers, unlike a totally objective model from a source like Baseball Prospectus. This is a good thing: if the idea is to track Cleveland teams’ ability to meet expectations, public opinion ought to be a factor. Accordingly, the Championship Watch will mostly rely on the odds disseminated by Vegas to track the expectations and possibilities of success for the Browns, Indians, and Cavaliers.1
When you bet your buddy five bucks that you can make a ten-foot turnaround jump shot á la Kobe Bryant into a trash can with a crumpled beer can, that’s ordinarily a straight-up wager. If you make the shot, your buddy owes you five dollars. If you miss it, you owe him five dollars. What’s implicit in this wager is that it’s valued as a toss-up — the odds of said beer can landing in said trash are about the same as the beer can thudding to the ground and giving a more environmentally-conscious person a chance to recycle it. There’s roughly a fifty-percent chance of each outcome. But if the bet concerns something much more unlikely, someone is given “odds.” If instead of a ten-foot jump shot, you’re attempting a half-court heave on a basketball court, or trying to hit a hole in one with your pitching wedge, you’d want your friend to pony up say, $25, if you’re successful compared to the five dollars you’d lose if you predictably fail.
Well, the probability of winning a championship in a major American sport is an unlikely event, even if you’re a great team. But when Vegas allows someone to wager on the possibility of an event happening, giving he or she favorable odds to entice the wager, that number indicates the probability of the event occurring. If Vegas gives the Cleveland Browns 9:1 odds of winning the Super Bowl (dream big!), they’re saying that if the season were played ten times, the Browns would win one Super Bowl — or, there’s a ten percent chance the Browns will win the championship that season. If a team has 50:1 odds, they’re quite the long shot. A team receiving 1:3 odds is a heavy favorite, and expected to win 75 percent of the time.2
Isolated in time, a snapshot of the odds given to the Browns, Indians, and Cavs to succeed in their respective sports are usually uninteresting. The Browns are bad of late and the Cavs are less bad. The experiment here is to see if by monitoring these things over time, insights can be gleaned based on what impacts each team’s prospective success. How does recent play affect predicted success? How much can an injury influence potential success? Are preseason predictions more reliable than knee-jerk reactions to the in-season tumult. We can also monitor how each team is over- or underperforming expectations over time. Most weeks, there won’t be much to say, but I’ll provide analysis when warranted.
Title Ticker
This is the simplest way to evaluate where the teams are at any moment in time. It’s not the most informative prognostication, but it is the most immediate.3 According to Vegas, the Cavs have a 32.14 percent chance of winning a championship, the best in the NBA. This is based on their 9:2 odds, meaning that if you wagered 100 imaginary dollars on the Cavs, you would win 180 imaginary dollars if they won the NBA Finals.4 That has to be encouraging for all Cavs fans. The Indians have a respectable 3.46 percent chance of winning the World Series, 12th in the MLB. The Browns have one of the bleakest futures in the NFL, according to Vegas.
The Indians
Expectations are fairly high in Goodyear and Cleveland, as Michael already discussed briefly with some help from Corey Kluber (and will do so throughout the season). The Indians have 25:1 odds of winning the World Series, and while a 3.46 percent chance of winning the World Series doesn’t sound exciting, it’s good for 12th in the MLB — not too shabby.
The most probable champions in the MLB are the Washington Nationals (12.0 percent chance) and the Los Angeles Dodgers (10.0 percent), two teams that continue to disappoint in September and October. Weirdly, the Indians are tied with the Detroit Tigers with the best chance to win the Central Division (28.1 percent), but the Tigers and Chicago White Sox are pegged as more probable World Series champions. This indicates that people perceive the Tribe as a very good baseball club, but one with only enough juice to make the playoffs but not to win in the playoffs. The Tribe’s over/under win total is at 85, one that seems to be a very reasonable reasonable estimate of the team’s capabilities, and we’ll track their progress toward that number throughout the season.
The Browns
There’s not much to say about the Browns Super Bowl hopes in February. At 75:1 odds (1.2 percent chance to win the Super Bowl), they’re a true long shot. They’re not perceived as being a possible championship contender. They were 7-4 at one point last season before unraveling, but a rocky offseason has me thrilled that anyone would give the team more than a one percent chance of winning the Super Bowl. The only less likely champions are the New York Jets, the Washington Redskins, the Oakland Raiders, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Jacksonville Jaguars, and the Tennessee Titans (teams the Browns went 3-1 against last year).
The Cavaliers
The Cavs’ title odds jumped nearly 10 percent in four days.
The most interesting thing about the Cavs probability of winning the title is its drastic jump since Monday morning. Before news that Derrick Rose would need to repair a meniscus tear that will sideline him for the rest of the season, the Cavs were about 3:1 favorites, with a 22.5 percent probability of winning the Finals. Because of the Rose injury, the Cavs’ chances jumped 5.6 percent in only one day (11:5 odds). This is a severe example of how external forces can influence a team’s chances of winning.
Then, the Cavs’ chances improved another four percent after the victory over the runner-up favorites, the Golden State Warriors. As a result, between one injury on another team and a mildly impressive victory over the best team in the NBA, the Cavs’ title odds jumped nearly 10 percent in four days.
Surprisingly, the faith of Vegas/the public in the Cavaliers has not wavered all season. When the Cavs were 8-7 on December 1, their probability dipped only slightly. They remained the favorites even as the Warriors and Atlanta Hawks were tearing apart the league and the Cavs sagged to 19-20 and struggled mightily. Probably because Vegas always regarded them so highly, the odds didn’t change now that the team has won 17 of 19 games A.B. (After Bowling).
All of this is of course a major improvement over the foreseeable future at the end of last season. The earliest available odds I could find for the 2014-15 season had the Cavs as 60:1 long shots at the beginning of last June, after the Cavs had won the NBA Draft Lottery. After the Cavs drafted Andrew Wiggins on June 26, 2014 (as the first overall pick in the draft) the team was still a 40:1 long shot, with only a 2.2 percent chance of winning the Finals. The Cavs’ odds quadrupled as rumors began to swirl that LeBron James may return. At the beginning of July, both the Miami Heat and the Cleveland Cavaliers were top-four prospective champions, with the Heat at a 15.0 percent chance to be champs compared to the Cavs’ 8.2 percent chance. After LeBron announced that he would return, the Cavs’ chances more than doubled, exploding to 22.5 percent. The team’s odds never appreciably receded again despite their early season woes. Basically, LeBron James single-handedly makes a team more than 10 times as likely to win a championship.5
As their over/under was 59 wins before the season, the Cavaliers didn’t meet the massive expectations early. The Cavs would have to win 22 of their last 23 games to reach that total, which seems highly unlikely even if they continue to play as well as they have of late. But, overnight, they went from winning at the pace of a 39-win team, to winning at the pace of a 73-win team (the NBA regular season record is 72 wins). If the Cavs odds at winning the Finals is truly 32.1 percent, then it’s certainly the best chance Cleveland has had at a title since the 2009-10 Cavaliers. Between the Cavs, the Indians, and the Browns, there’s a 35.2 percent chance that Cleveland won’t be Waiting For Next Year. I’ll take those odds.
- This model is subject to change in the future.
- Casinos and bookies also overrate the likelihood of something happening, so that they may pay out less money when it does occur. I assumed that Vegas’s juice was about 10 percent, meaning that something was 90 percent as likely as advertised. This seems to be a decent rule of thumb.
- The change is since Monday, February 23.
- Data via Vegas Insider, which obtains its odds from Sportsbook.
- Based on the data available, the acquisition of Kevin Love not impact the the Cavs’ probability of success much. LeBron moves the needle much more.