{"items": [{"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755950432152", "anchor": "fb-755950432152", "service": "fb", "text": "Shouldn't there be a streak of 5's for basketball for the Celtcs in the 60s? Maybe I'm not interpreting it right...", "timestamp": "1446786961"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755950432152&reply_comment_id=755979523852", "anchor": "fb-755950432152_755979523852", "service": "fb", "text": "→ If a team wins in years N, N-2, and N-4 then that's 3 wins in the last 5 years. But some team wins every year, so the data is clearer if I subtract 1 from each number. So the streak of 5s is there, but shows up as a streak of 4s.", "timestamp": "1446817124"}, {"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755950432152&reply_comment_id=755984319242", "anchor": "fb-755950432152_755984319242", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Take basketball, '64 to '66 - in each of those years, the winner (Celtics) had also won the 5 previous championships - that's where I'm looking for the 5-5-5 streak. I know there is a simple explanation, I am just missing it", "timestamp": "1446819987"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755950432152&reply_comment_id=755987293282", "anchor": "fb-755950432152_755987293282", "service": "fb", "text": "→ You're completely right, my basketball data is all wrong. I pulled the wrong list, and don't know the sport well enough to notice. I pulled the \"western champion\" list instead of the \"nba champion\" list. Updating now...", "timestamp": "1446820246"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755950432152&reply_comment_id=755987782302", "anchor": "fb-755950432152_755987782302", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Fixed now.", "timestamp": "1446820824"}, {"author": "Ben", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755950432152&reply_comment_id=755990791272", "anchor": "fb-755950432152_755990791272", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Ah, that looks good - had Michael Jordan not try to fulfill his baseball fantasy, there would likely be another Celtic-sized spike in the 90's. Folk wisdom these days is that baseball and hockey have the most parity, basketball the least - the graphs seem to bear that out", "timestamp": "1446823324"}, {"author": "Perry", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755950432152&reply_comment_id=756125820672", "anchor": "fb-755950432152_756125820672", "service": "fb", "text": "→ Ben - we Bulls fans remember that quite well. I was in complete shock when Jordan left in 1993.", "timestamp": "1446901967"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/106627634005073412802", "anchor": "gp-1446788286135", "service": "gp", "text": "couple things that stick out, right off the bat:\n
\n
\nthe leagues/teams/championships did not start in same years. The American League (baseball) was founded in 1901 and the first World Series was 1903. The Boston Bruins were not founded until 1924, after Boston had 5 Major League Baseball World Series championships. The Celtics were founded in 1946, and joined the NBA in 1949. The Patriots were founded in 1960, and the first Superbowl was for the 1966 season.\n
\n
\nAnother thing is that there are many more teams in each league now than there were before, so there are more possible winners now.\n
\n
\nThird, as playoffs have expanded, there is much more randomness now in which team wins the championship. In baseball, for example, it used to be that the team with the best record from American League would play the team with the best record from the National League in the World Series. That's a pretty large sample size to determine the Series participants. Then they added a League Championship Series round. Then they added the Division Series Round. Then they added a one game Wild Card Round. That's 10 teams in the playoffs, some of which possibly could have only won a handful more than they've lost. That's more teams in the playoffs now than there were in the entire American League for the first World Series years. Those teams are playing short series, so a very small sample size, thus the winner is determined much more randomly.", "timestamp": 1446788286}, {"author": "Todd", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755955362272", "anchor": "fb-755955362272", "service": "fb", "text": "I disagree with your conclusion. In baseball, there's quite a density of repeats through the 70s, then it's quite sparse through today save for the late 90s Yankees and the Giants of the last few years. Hockey is even clearer, going from frequent 2s and 3s to a handful of 1s.
Football has the most volatile structure (huge roster, tiny season, 1 game playoff rounds), so it's not surprising that it never had the density of repeat champions that other sports do. Basketball is the opposite (small roster, huge season, long playoff rounds that lack the variance introduced in baseball by the starting rotation and batted ball outcomes), so there it's not surprising that there's so many repeats. Even so, it looks to me like the density has decreased a bit in both of these sports as well.
That is the trend you'd expect, of course, for the reasons mentioned on G+: more teams, bigger (more random) playoffs. And on top of that, free agency (as you mentioned) and increased market efficiency (less institutional ineptitude).
I guess I'd say you might need to present the data differently. For one thing, it might make more sense to display it as \"number of titles within two years on either side of this year by this year's champion\", so that the results are concentrated in the middle of a run, rather than at the end (it would also throw out things like the 1987 + 1991 Twins, which could be good or bad depending on how you want to evaluate it). But it might also make sense to then overlay a moving average, because the graph is very spiky, which makes it harder to read.", "timestamp": "1446790138"}, {"author": "Todd", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755956195602", "anchor": "fb-755956195602", "service": "fb", "text": "Also mentioned on G+, but not called out explicitly, is the fact that the pre-20s Red Sox run predated any other teams, the early Bruins titles predated the Celtics and Pats, and the first long Celtics run predated the Super Bowl. So some of that trend is less significant than it seems. But it also shouldn't be surprising that a city's championships would clump by sport if a sport's championships clump by team. The odds of that happening in two sports at once in the same city are pretty low, after all.
The fact that the Patriots sandwiched titles around the Sox during the 03-04 seasons is probably the second most impressive thing from this list (after the sheer volume of Celtics titles). I'd be interested to know what other cities have won multiple major sport titles in the same year. In the case of football and baseball this is arguably ambiguous, since the Super Bowl is in the calendar year following its season, but in this particular case the Patriots covered on both sides. I'd probably define it by calendar season, rather than Super Bowl date, but I'm probably in the minority on that.", "timestamp": "1446791096"}, {"author": "Jess", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755973800322", "anchor": "fb-755973800322", "service": "fb", "text": "That's some noisy data. I recommend calculating the \"two-point\" correlation function, essentially how often someone wins the championship if they won it N years ago, for all N, as a function of time. That should make it easier to see dynasties like the Celtics that had off years.", "timestamp": "1446810111"}, {"author": "Andrew", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755975152612", "anchor": "fb-755975152612", "service": "fb", "text": "Pj Jedlovec", "timestamp": "1446812503"}, {"author": "Ezra", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755977008892", "anchor": "fb-755977008892", "service": "fb", "text": "Hey Jeff, your assumption (guess or the result of more sports knowledge than you're letting on) that free agent rules changed its completely right. Back when the Sox, Bruins, and Celtics were winning streaks of titles, there was no free agency. It was relatively easy for one team to assemble a great team and then lord over the league for a while.
The talent pools were also smaller (because some populations like African-Americans and Europeans were excluded and because the reward for playing had not exploded yet) so new players coming into the league were less likely to tip the balance.", "timestamp": "1446814133"}, {"author": "Perry", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/755948461102?comment_id=755980142612", "anchor": "fb-755980142612", "service": "fb", "text": "Often teams win a lot of championships in a short period (such as the Chicago Blackhawks or the SF Giants) because they are able to keep a core of great players and plug in good role players. The Bulls in the 90s won 6 titles with Michael Jordan and lost the two years without Jordan for a full season. I think 5 years is a pretty good way to catch teams on these runs. Also worth it is to investigate how often teams are in the championship but lost - the Yankees between 96 and 03 were in it a lot but didn't always win, but their long dynasty is worth noting. It is harder to win now due to free agency and longer playoffs but many teams still do because they can keep a core player or two on their team.", "timestamp": "1446817719"}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/106627634005073412802", "anchor": "gp-1446862836247", "service": "gp", "text": "Were these all the teams that were represented? The Boston Braves won the World Series in 1914.", "timestamp": 1446862836}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/103013777355236494008", "anchor": "gp-1446914551939", "service": "gp", "text": "@Daniel\n\u00a0And the Boston Americans in 1903.\n
\n
\nBut yes, these were the only ones that were up at the airport.", "timestamp": 1446914551}, {"author": "Daniel", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/106627634005073412802", "anchor": "gp-1446933538688", "service": "gp", "text": "@Jeff Kaufman\n\u00a0and as you know, the Boston Americans are\u00a0the same franchise that we now know as the Boston Red Sox.", "timestamp": 1446933538}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/103013777355236494008", "anchor": "gp-1446988988634", "service": "gp", "text": "@Daniel\n\u00a0Didn't know that, actually!", "timestamp": 1446988988}]}