Every year during the NBA Preseason we hear phrases like: "Who cares about our record; the preseason means nothing", or "We're 6-1; this is going to be a good year!"

Of course, technically, preseason games don't matter one bit. The goal of each team, each season, is to win a Championship. To win a Championship, you must first get there, and that means making the Playoffs, which is directly based on regular season records and absolutely nothing to do with preseason records. So, any team can theoretically win zero preseason games, and then go on to win a Championship. Conversely, any team can win all of their preseason games and then go on to flop in the regular season.

With the 07-08 preseason now coming to a close, what I would like to explore with this article is just how much we can take from preseason games. However, rather than just making casual observations, I will attempt to take a scientific look at the numbers.

Before we look at the numbers, though, I would like establish what types of numbers I will be working with and a few notes about them. I will be working with correlations, which, as quoted from Wikipedia, "indicates the strength and direction of a linear relationship between two random variables." A correlation will range from 1 through +1 and is stronger the closer it is to -1 or +1, and weaker the closer it is to 0. Further, a correlation of -.67, for example, is the same strength as a correlation of +.67 - it just signifies a different relationship. In the instance of +.67 the two variables show a positive correlation, or as in this case, high preseason winning percentages are paired with high regular season winning percentages and low preseason winning percentages are paired with low regular season winning percentages. Conversely, in the case of -.67 the two variables show a negative, or inverted, correlation in which high preseason winning percentages tend to be paired with low regular season winning percentages and low preseason winning percentages tend to be paired with high regular season winning percentages.

I began by compiling preseason and regular season records starting with the 06-07 season and going back through the 99-00 season. With this I was able to get a pretty good sample size (n=235) and stop at the disaster lockout season in 98-99.

The overall correlation between preseason records and regular season records over the course of those eight seasons is .35, which is considered a moderate positive correlation

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