On Monday, the Kings announced that whenever the Kings score above 99 and the other team scores below 99, everyone in Arco gets a free taco.  I think season ticket holders can expect about 7-9 tacos this year.  Let the taco chants begin!  Seriously, I have some numbers-based "analysis" below.

With over 3 minutes left in the game and Sacramento leading Toronto 103 to 98 (I believe that was the score, but I could be wrong), I was hoping the Kings could shut out the Raptors...Reality set in quickly, however, and just like that the notion of a free taco was gone.

Sad-Face Keanu wants free tacos too, via img209.imageshack.us

But that got me thinking...how many games have the Kings won where they scored at least 99 points and held their opponents under 98 points?

According to Basketball-Reference.com, it happened to the Kings 7 times last season, 4 times the year before that, 3 times in the 2007-2008 season, and 7 times in the 2006-2007 season.

I also ran the numbers to see how many times all teams in the NBA have scored over 99 and held their opponents under 99 at home for each of the past three season.  The average number of times that happened league-wide were 8.97 times in 2009-10, 9.17 times in 2008-09, and 9.87 times in 2007-08.  The standard deviation for each of the seasons were 4.3-4.9 so that tells you how varied it was across the league.

Stats 101 intro aside, I came to the conclusion that season ticket holders can expect about 7-9 free tacos this year. You may have noticed a few things:

1.  Free tacos for season ticket holders?  Awesome!

2. The 7-9 games we score over 99 and hold opponents under 99 is nothing other than a hunch based on this team and other NBA teams' prior years of performance.

3.  The Kings have not scored AND played defense as well as many other NBA clubs, based on this one statistic.  (And yes, I understand that you can score over/under 99 and have your opponent score over/under 99 and still win games.  This stat doesn't even begin to measure the intricate relationships between winning and offense/defense--I'm merely using it to argue for tacos.)

4.  I spent WAY too much time to figure out how often I'd be getting 50 cent tacos that are questionably tasty.