NUMBERS SAY '97 WAS GOOD YEAR FOR L.A.Byline: KEVIN MODESTI Was 1997 a good sports year in Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. and vicinity? Well, none of our teams won championships, at least not in the major sports. It was a rough time for coaches, as John Robinson Several notable individuals have been named John Robinson: Politicians
Ronald Lawrence Wilson were fired and Del Harris and Bill Russell had public altercations with players. The Dodgers were sold to Rupert Murdoch, and after Murdoch watched them play in September, he was sorry he misplaced mis·place tr.v. mis·placed, mis·plac·ing, mis·plac·es 1. a. To put into a wrong place: misplace punctuation in a sentence. b. the receipt. Even Shaquille O'Neal might not think it was such a great first year here after H&R Block gets through with him. Given everything that went on, you may be surprised to learn that in general, 1997 was the best year of the decade in L.A. and Anaheim sports. In fact, the best year since 1988, when both the Dodgers and Lakers won championships. Says who? Says the Daily News' Southern California Sports Index. You've never heard of the SCSI SCSI in full Small Computer System Interface Once common standard for connecting peripheral devices (disks, modems, printers, etc.) to small and medium-sized computers. SCSI has given way to faster standards, such as Firewire and USB. . Nobody has. I just invented it. This is its debut. It's about time It's About Time may refer to:
Economic series that tend to rise or fall in advance of the rest of the economy. , which are indexes unto themselves, and there's the index of leading economic indicators index of leading economic indicators An index that is compiled by the Conference Board, a private-sector consulting firm. The index is designed to indicate the future direction of economic activity. , which is an index of indexes. Smog has an index, called the Pollutant Standard Index, and misery has an index, though we don't hear much about it anymore. Sports should have an index. And now it does. The SCSI answers the question that began this column. It measures the combined success of the L.A. and Anaheim teams that most people follow. Understand: The SCSI only cares about wins and losses. It's a dispassionate dis·pas·sion·ate adj. Devoid of or unaffected by passion, emotion, or bias. See Synonyms at fair1. dis·pas sort. The SCSI doesn't care about the price of a ticket. The SCSI doesn't care about leg room in the box seats. The SCSI doesn't care about the color of the uniforms. The SCSI doesn't care who owns the team and who gave the point guard his car. The SCSI would prefer to have a professional football team to root for, but without one, the SCSI concentrates on the nine major pro and college teams that are here. These days, those teams are baseball's Dodgers and Angels, basketball's Lakers and Clippers, hockey's Kings and Mighty Ducks, as well as the USC An abbreviation for U.S. Code. and UCLA UCLA University of California at Los Angeles UCLA University Center for Learning Assistance (Illinois State University) UCLA University of Carrollton, TX and Lower Addison, TX football teams and UCLA men's basketball team. Sorry, USC basketball. Sorry, Galaxy, Sparks and Team Penske. Maybe you'll be included next year. Until then, go make up your own index. The SCSI is simple and logical. For each team, regular- and post-season victories are added together. (For 1997, we include all the games in the basketball and hockey seasons that ended in '97.) That victory total is divided by the number of regular-season games played to get a number that looks like a percentage. Thus, playoff and bowl victories are treated like ``bonus points,'' which only seems fair. Next, the teams' percentages are added together and divided by the number of teams. The result is the SCSI for the year. Remember, the SCSI isn't actually the winning percentage of L.A. and Anaheim teams, because of the way that playoff and bowl victories are added as ``bonus'' wins and the fact that schedules of various lengths are weighted equally. But as with a winning percentage, higher is better. The SCSI for the year just completed was .597. And that's outstanding. It's not only a lot better than the .499 of the year before. It's also the highest for any year since 1988, when the Dodgers' and Lakers' titles, a good Rams team and good USC and UCLA football teams led Southern California to a glossy .604. For a year-by-year list, beginning with the brilliant SCSIs of the pre-Clippers early '80s, see the accompanying box. Why was 1997 so good? Because the Angels had their best year since 1989, the Lakers their best since '91, the Clippers their best since '93, the Kings their best since '94 (that's sad), the Ducks their best ever and UCLA football its best since '88. And the Rams and Raiders are in St. Louis and Oakland. No championships. A little turmoil. But the Southern California Sports Index says that if you attended or tuned in an L.A. or Anaheim sports event in '97, you were more likely to cheer the outcome than in any year in a long time. You never heard that from the Dow Jones Industrial Average Dow Jones Industrial Average The best known U.S. index of stocks. A price-weighted average of 30 actively traded blue-chip stocks, primarily industrials including stocks that trade on the New York Stock Exchange. . CAPTION(S): Box Box: 1997: A HAPPY OLD YEAR Kevin Modesti |
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