Forecasting NBA Basketball Playoff Outcomes Using the Weighted Likelihood ∗

Predicting the outcome of a future game between two sports teams poses a challenging problem of interest to statistical scientists as well as the general public. To be effective such prediction must exploit special contextual features of the game. In this paper, we confront such features and address the need to: (i) use all relevant sample information; (ii) reflect the home game advantage. To do so we use the weighted likelihood. Finally we demonstrate the value of the method by showing how it could have been used to predict the 96/97 NBA playoff results. Our weighted likelihood-based method proves to be quite accurate. Key words: Likelihood; relevance weighted likelihood; predicting basketball scores; sports statistics; NBA; basketball