The Game Tracker is hands-down my favorite Are You Watching This?! app, and hearing how much everyone is enjoying it makes me love it even more. There has been a flood of people getting introduced to RUWT?! via the Game Tracker (StumbleUpon is still in business? Seriously?), but sometimes they arrive when there aren’t any games in progress.

I want to make sure we have cool data for everyone, so today we rolled out a version of the Game Tracker just for the 2011 NBA Playoffs. Not only can you track all in-progress NBA games, but you can also break down games series by series. There’s tons of great data to sift through, and I found an interesting pattern with the defending champs.

The first round matchup between the Lakers and Hornets ended pretty much the way you’d expect. When you pit the defending champs trying to peak at the right time against a 7 seed with an All-World guard at the point, a Lakers win in six games seems about right. Looking at the series as a whole, there’s a pretty average mix of so-so and great games.

Let’s take a closer look at just Game 1 and 4–the two games L.A. lost. See anything interesting? The graphs are almost exactly the same for the two games where the Hornets prevailed. Coincidence? Maybe. But maybe something much more. In both games, trailing just a few minutes into the fourth quarter, the Lakers let the game slip from a one-possession game to a four-possession game in the blink of an eye. In Game 1 it happened between 8:45 and 7:00 to go, and in Game 4 the spurt was between 9:31 to 8:04.

The Lakers valiantly tried to mount comebacks, but in the 41st minute of each of both games they dug too large a hole–they never got closer than three points. Is it a concentration issue? Have the Lakers gotten too old to mount late game comebacks? Already down 0-2 to the Mavs, does it matter?

Only time and RUWTbot will tell.

What interesting patterns can you find?

Pssst. Hockey fans…stay tuned.

Looking for the best NBA Assist of the Night? Or maybe the best Block of the Night? No need to search through nba.com, cause we’ll hook you up. Throughout each day we’ll be adding new clips from all 30 NBA teams to the 5000+ videos already in the vault. We’ll grab the videos of the best plays posted by the NBA and include them right in the recap for the game.

Sure last night’s Wizards/Grizz game was a snoozer, but Nick Young’s Dunk of the Night was sick.

Enjoy.

Since we had another crazy night of hail here in Austin, I figure it’s a good time for some spring cleaning on the RUWT?blog.

Later today your favorite blog will be changing addresses. No longer will it be at the lame areyouwatchingthis.com/blog. Nay, shortly you will find it at brand new, completely different digs at blog.areyouwatchingthis.com.

Your browser will redirect you and RSS Feeds will move over automatically later today. Later today not precise enough for you? Hm. Let’s say shortly after I go kill some Migas at Trudy’s and am laying on the couch in a post-“cheesy goodness” coma watching Lebron at the Wizards.

Let me know if you have any questions or problems.

Well, well, well. I wasn’t expecting much from the NBA playoffs this year. Once again I’m proved to be an idiot.

Sunday was solid with the Pistons forgetting that the playoffs had started, and Saturday was rockstar with the Suns/Spurs craziness (Duncan for 3? Really? Really?) and the “Man, I just want to punch somebody” tension in the Cavs/Wizards series. Oh yeah. And Gilbert Arenas’ video game length range. Ridiculous.

Folks might wonder what I do all day (other than watch sports), so here’s a quick recap of a couple features launched in the past couple days.

Wait, when did he say that?
I like strolling through the bleachers to check out shouts and roots for games that I can’t see, but sometimes it’s hard to tell why people are getting so fired up. Now you can see exactly what the score was and how much time was left when a stream of roots started coming in.

No, no, no, you’re supposed to like this page!

One of my biggest frustrations as a sports fan (and a lot of the motivation to start RUWT?) is how hard it is find out what games are on TV each night. Surprisingly (to me at least 🙂 ), the “Games on TV” page isn’t in the Top 5 for most viewed pages on the site, so I figured it needed some sprucing up. Usually pages like this would go into the Beta testing area first, but I figured it was good enough to launch right away.

And no, I’m not a designer. I just play one on the Internets.