Archive for the 'Season Preview' Category

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After many months of projections, it's finally time to unveil our official preseason forecast. They're based on our Win Shares projection system, with rosters/depth charts current as of Sunday, October 25, 2009. We used Win Shares to establish a base team strength rating for each squad, and then plugged those into the handy log5 formula and ran another 10,000-season simulation. What follows are the rosters (newcomers are highlighted in yellow), projected per-minute stats from our Simple Projection System, projected WS, the results of our 10,000-season sim, and my brief (200-words-or-fewer) thoughts on each team. So let's start the show, in reverse order, beginning with…

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Following up on the work we did here about a month ago, here are the final versions of our projected Win Shares per minute, broken down into offensive and defensive WS/mp. The biggest change here is that I used the new Win Shares formula for past seasons, the new Simple Projection System to create the rates, and hopefully I also included every player who could possibly play in the NBA this season (708 in all!). So enjoy, and stay tuned for the big preview rollout on Monday and Tuesday, when we'll combine these rates with a playing-time projection and our Monte Carlo simulator to give you our official predictions for the season.

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Quick question: What's the probability that the league's "best" team will win the championship this season? Okay, then what are the odds that a team outside the top 5 in talent will win it all? Outside the top 10? The top 15?

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This week, the news Knicks fans have been hoping to hear finally came: David Lee and Nate Robinson re-signed with the club, each inking 1-year deals in the $5-7 million range that (most importantly) will not interfere with the Knicks' long-awaited free agent pursuit of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, or any of the other headliners in the star-studded FA class of 2010.

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So, after a long week of programming, here's the first pass at a Win Shares-based projection system... The calculation is structured the same as the Simple Projection System, except that this method is used. Playing time was estimated based on Ed Kupfer's formula for game missed due to injury, a minutes per game formula (MPG = 10.16 + (0.557*MPG_Y-1)+(0.029*MPG_Y-2)), and total team minutes were forced to reconcile to 60% for starters, 30% for 2nd-stringers, and 10% for benchwarmers (HoopsHype's depth charts were used for the designations). And a final note, remember that these projections will be unrealistically close to the mean for players, teams, and playing time numbers, because of the heavy degree of regression being used. Anyway, here are the results:

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Recently, we've been focused on projecting various "meta-stats" for the upcoming 2009-2010 NBA season, starting with Statistical +/- and now moving to Win Shares, with the goal of predicting how each team will finish based on their current rosters. Rate stats are, of course, relatively easy to project for basketball players because they don't fluctuate a ridiculous amount from season to season -- they are generally a function of the player's ability level, with teammates, coaches, and other external factors playing a role as well. Playing time, however, is always difficult to project because much of it stems from factors outside the player's control, like injuries, coaching decisions, trades, etc.

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As part of the process required to create a projection system for Win Shares similar to that which we employed for Statistical +/-, I have to create tables with four-year WS trends for each player in NBA history. So, since I'm clearly not going to get the projections done today, I figured I'd hold you guys over with a table of these trends for all players who played in 2009 and/or will play in 2010 (rookies excluded, for obvious reasons). It's a huge data dump, I know, but at least it gives you a look at how each team's current roster looks, Win Shares-wise. (Team designations are according to ESPN's NBA Players page and HoopsHype's free agency page. "DP#" = Draft Pick #, or their overall position in the NBA draft the year they came out. Players with DP#=61 were undrafted.)

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Last week, we took a very preliminary look at what our Statistical Plus/Minus projection system saw in the cards for the 2009-10 NBA Season. To project minutes played, we used a very simplistic regression equation that took a weighted average of a player's minutes over the past three seasons and regressed it heavily to the mean. Of course, this is a very rough way to estimate what a player's minutes will be next season; in fact, the standard error of the playing time regression (done on all players from 1978-2009) was 674.8, meaning that the prediction was likely to be off by a significant amount in either direction, too high or too low. As you might guess, this could severely impact the accuracy of the projected standings.

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Since everyone seems to be jumping on the projection bandwagon right now, here are the preliminary projected standings for 2010 (I'll explain the process at the bottom):

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