So, clearly, things are going to be a little different and less-structured this season, whatever of it we get.

Firstly, since we’re now going to be playing 16-minute quarters, we need to rethink our forecasts.

HEAD-TO-HEAD FORECASTS

There doesn’t seem to be any compelling reason to change our approach to these on the basis of foreshortened quarters, so we’ll make no adjustments here.

MARGIN FORECASTS

Shorter games, surely, will produce smaller total scores, but what effect might we expect them to have on margins?

Analysing the home-and-away games from the past 10 years reveals that historically, at the 80% mark, the absolute margin has been about 82% of the final absolute margin, and that the total score has been about 79.5% of the final total score.

Based on that, for now, the margin forecasts for all Margin Predictors except Bookie_Hcap will be 80% of what they would otherwise have been. Bookie_Hcap will, if prices are even money, the negative of the line and otherwise will be 80% of the implied margin using Bookie_OE and assuming a Normal distribution with a mean of zero and standard deviation of 36 points.

Note that ENS_Linear takes as its inputs bookmaker prices and handicaps, as well as MARS ratings and venuing information. It’s not immediately obvious how best to adjusted its forecasts but, for now, I’m also going to take 80% of what it would otherwise have forecast, but after increasing the bookmaker’s start by 25%.

PROBABILITY ESTIMATES

I think it makes sense to leave these unchanged (not least because I can’t decide how I’d adjust them if I did decide it was warranted).

UPDATED FORECASTS

So, with those adjustments made, here are the updated forecasts (and MoSHPlay’s forecast for tonight’s game)

And here as MoSS2020’s and MoSH2020’s revised views on margin and team scores (note that no adjustments have been made to the Ratings or Venue Effects, only to the section headed Expectations (Pts) - Adjusted)