The playoffs are coming--there are just over 3 weeks left in the regular season. Most teams have roughly a dozen games left to try to nab a playoff seed ... or collect a few more lottery balls. With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to graph each team's wins by date to enable visual trend spotting.

The Southwest Division (shown below) provides some good examples:

• Dallas and San Antonio have been nip and tuck throughout the year; the Spurs currently hold a 1-game lead.
• New Orleans/Oklahoma City seems to have hit the wall. They were tied with Memphis at the end of February, but have since fallen 8 games behind.
• While they were healthy, the Rockets put together two months of good basketball; the rest of the season has been a disaster.

UPDATE: Changed graph to include net wins (wins minus losses) as well as total wins for improved visualization (based on a posted suggestion).

Atlanta Boston Charlotte Chicago Cleveland Dallas Denver Detroit Golden State Houston Indiana LA Clippers LA Lakers Memphis Miami Milwaukee Minnesota New Jersey NO/OKC New York Orlando Philadelphia Phoenix Portland Sacramento San Antonio Seattle Toronto Utah Washington Atlanta Boston Charlotte Chicago Cleveland Dallas Denver Detroit Golden State Houston Indiana LA Clippers LA Lakers Memphis Miami Milwaukee Minnesota New Jersey NO/OKC New York Orlando Philadelphia Phoenix Portland Sacramento San Antonio Seattle Toronto Utah Washington Atlanta Boston Charlotte Chicago Cleveland Dallas Denver Detroit Golden State Houston Indiana LA Clippers LA Lakers Memphis Miami Milwaukee Minnesota New Jersey NO/OKC New York Orlando Philadelphia Phoenix Portland Sacramento San Antonio Seattle Toronto Utah Washington Atlanta Boston Charlotte Chicago Cleveland Dallas Denver Detroit Golden State Houston Indiana LA Clippers LA Lakers Memphis Miami Milwaukee Minnesota New Jersey NO/OKC New York Orlando Philadelphia Phoenix Portland Sacramento San Antonio Seattle Toronto Utah Washington Atlanta Boston Charlotte Chicago Cleveland Dallas Denver Detroit Golden State Houston Indiana LA Clippers LA Lakers Memphis Miami Milwaukee Minnesota New Jersey NO/OKC New York Orlando Philadelphia Phoenix Portland Sacramento San Antonio Seattle Toronto Utah Washington
Net Wins Wins

To see other examples, use the form above to select up to five different teams, or choose from one of the groups below:

Eastern Conference			Western Conference
Divisions Atlantic Central Southeast	Seeds (as of 3/28/06) 1-5 6-10 11-15		Divisions Northwest Pacific Southwest	Seeds (as of 3/28/06) 1-5 6-10 11-15

Other interesting combinations: see how the Pacers and Kings performed after the January 25 Peja-for-Artest trade, or how the Timberwolves and Celtics fared after the Szczerbiak/Davis 7-player deal on January 26. Feel free to add a comment if you find other notable comparisons.

Tonight I'm pleased to announce the launch of a new sports-related blog-tracking application: striketwo.net.

Like lowpost.net, it tracks many more blogs than I can read, summarizing common discussions and ranking the players and teams that appear--but for baseball-themed blogs. As it turns out, there are a lot more baseball blogs than basketball blogs out there, and striketwo.net is now monitoring 600 of them.

One recent addition to lowpost.net that also appears is the new Blog Rankings page. It ranks all tracked blogs by influence, which is a measure of incoming links from individual posts (similar to Technorati's authority metric).

Special thanks to Matt Watson of Detroit Bad Boys and Fake Teams, for planting the idea and providing a lot of good feedback during the development process.

striketwo.net is still in beta testing, so if you have any feedback or suggestions, please pass them along.

Compared to January, February was a quiet month for individual scoring in the NBA. We saw 3 fewer 50+ point games, 9 fewer 40+ point games, and Kobe Bryant's high score for the month was just 40. Nevertheless, there were several highly efficient performances, including 40+ point triple-double games from LeBron James and Joe Johnson, a 9-13 3-point shooting game from Ben Gordon, and an 11-11 shooting night from Nenad Krstic.

Once again, I've computed one take on the best and worst performances from the past month below. As usual, the ratings are based on John Hollinger's Game Scores formula; see November's breakdown for an explanation.

Best Performances (February 2006)

Player	Date	Min	FG	3P	FT	Reb	Ass	PF	St	TO	Blk	Pts	Score	Outcome
Shawn Marion	2/22/2006	43	15-22	4-7	10-10	15	0	3	4	2	3	44	44.8	Win
Gilbert Arenas	2/25/2006	30	13-16	7-10	13-14	1	2	2	4	1	0	46	43.5	Win
LeBron James	2/15/2006	54	16-32	0-5	11-15	12	11	5	2	2	4	43	37.9	Win
Joe Johnson	2/24/2006	47	16-24	5-5	3-3	1	13	5	3	4	0	40	36.4	Win
Elton Brand	2/10/2006	45	17-26	0-0	10-10	9	2	4	2	4	2	44	35.3	Win
Ben Gordon	2/4/2006	39	14-21	9-13	2-4	8	5	2	3	3	0	39	34.6	Loss
LeBron James	2/13/2006	41	19-33	1-3	5-8	3	5	0	4	2	0	44	34.5	Win
Jason Kidd	2/22/2006	42	10-13	4-6	4-4	7	11	3	3	2	0	28	33.7	Win
Dwyane Wade	2/6/2006	39	10-17	1-1	13-15	8	8	4	2	2	1	34	33.6	Win
Kirk Hinrich	2/28/2006	46	10-18	2-7	8-10	13	9	3	3	0	0	30	33.4	Win

Shawn Marion landed at the top of the list with a career high of 44 points to go with his 15 rebounds, 4 steals, and 3 blocks. Marion's scoring, rebounding, blocks, and Player Efficiency Rating are up this year, and he's a big reason why the Suns have exceeded expectations to date.

Gilbert Arenas bounced back from a tumultuous All-Star weekend with an amazingly efficient scoring game on the 25th: 13-16 shooting, 7-10 from 3-point range, 46 points in 30 minutes.

The only top-10 performance in February that didn't lead to a win was Ben Gordon's effort against the Suns on the 4th. Despite Gordon's 9 3-pointers made, the Suns scored 21 more points from 3-point range than the Bulls as a team that night.

Worst Performances (February 2006)

Player	Date	Min	FG	3P	FT	Reb	Ass	PF	St	TO	Blk	Pts	Score	Outcome
Mickael Pietrus	2/25/2006	32	2-12	1-2	0-0	1	0	1	0	4	0	5	-6.7	Loss
Gilbert Arenas	2/15/2006	45	4-22	0-2	4-6	2	3	5	0	6	2	12	-6.5	Loss
Vladimir Radmanovic	2/3/2006	18	0-6	0-2	0-0	4	0	2	1	3	0	0	-5.4	Loss
Monta Ellis	2/21/2006	14	0-8	0-2	0-0	1	1	2	0	0	0	0	-5.4	Loss
Mickael Pietrus	2/27/2006	21	0-5	0-4	0-0	3	0	2	0	3	1	0	-5.3	Loss
Keith McLeod	2/5/2006	20	1-6	0-1	0-0	1	0	4	0	2	0	2	-5.1	Loss
Stephon Marbury	2/27/2006	24	1-9	0-0	0-0	2	3	3	0	3	0	2	-5.0	Loss
Aleksandar Pavlovic	2/11/2006	21	1-8	0-3	0-0	1	1	6	0	1	1	2	-4.9	Loss
Brian Scalabrine	2/15/2006	34	1-5	0-2	0-0	0	0	4	0	2	0	2	-4.7	Loss
Jerry Stackhouse	2/27/2006	35	2-11	0-2	3-3	3	0	4	0	4	0	7	-4.6	Win

February's worst performances were all about the Warriors, with Golden State players claiming 3 of the worst five individual games:

• Mickael Pietrus, who was promoted to the starting lineup over Mike Dunleavy earlier in the month, closed the month with two consecutive bad games--recording a combined 2-17 in field goal shooting, with 5 points, 4 rebounds, 0 assists, and 7 turnovers. Back on the 13th, Pietrus dug the Warriors into a hole by intentionally fouling Chucky Atkins with 7 seconds left in regulation and the score tied. After the W's lost in overtime, a hilarious exchange between Dunleavy and an ESPN Radio reporter ensued.
• Rookie Monta Ellis played only 14 minutes against the Kings on the 21st, but he managed to take (and miss) 8 shots.

Following up on last month's post: Doc Rivers continued his pattern of riding poor performances, playing Brian Scalabrine a career-high 34 minutes despite the fact that he missed 4 of his 5 shots and failed to notch a single rebound, assist, steal, or blocked shot. At least this was a double-overtime game.

Other notes:

• Stephon Marbury's 1-9, 2-point, 3-assist performance against the Spurs came in his 3rd game playing alongside Steve Francis in the backcourt.
• You win some, you lose some: Gilbert Arenas had the 2nd-best and the 2nd-worst performances of the month.