Welcome to our 2010-11 NBA Blogosphere Previews, in which we contact the finest team bloggers on the web and ask them to contribute their thoughts on the squad they cover. What follows is their take, along with the team's depth chart (courtesy of ESPN.com), projected 2011 stats via our Simple Projection System, and polls where you get to have your say. Enjoy!

Utah Jazz

Coach: Jerry Sloan

2010 Summary:
Record: 53-29, Finished 1st in NBA Northwest Division
Pythagorean W-L: 55-27 (3rd of 30)
SRS: 5.33 (3rd of 30) ▪ Pace Factor: 93.8 (9th of 30)
Offensive Rating: 110.7 (8th of 30) ▪ Defensive Rating: 105.0 (10th of 30)

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You probably didn't know this (I admit we didn't exactly advertise it... at all, really), but our Simple Projection System (SPS) has been updated to produce projected stats for the upcoming 2010-11 season. That's good, because today I'm going to use those numbers tocome up with rudimentary "skill indices" for every projected player in the database, if for no other reason than to get a broad view of what each player is good at and how they fit in on their 2011 teams.

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Recently I had a chance to answer some Eastern Conference-related questions for Eddy Rivera of MagicBasketball.net, a longtime friend of the BBR Blog. In the interview, we chatted about not just the Magic, but also the Heat and the Celtics. Check it out!

Following up on last week's missive re: John Hollinger's team reports, I feel like I should also link the fact that Hollinger's 2011 player profiles are now available on ESPN.com as well (unfortunately, also "Insider" only). Don't let all the PER love fool you -- JH knows the game and has some good insights about player strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies.

The equivalent of Christmas morning amongst hoops stat-wonks, it's the annual unveiling of John Hollinger's NBA previews over at ESPN. And I'm sure the player comments are not far behind, either... Unfortunately, people who aren't ESPN "Insiders" don't seem to be able to access JH's stuff, which is sad -- but I guess the man has to make a living, just like the rest of us. And for those lucky enough to have Insider, enjoy.

Sorry to go on a 2011 Miami Heat bender here, but BBR Blog reader Nick had an intriguing comment in response to yesterday's post about a possible weakness of the LeBron James/Dwyane Wade tandem:

"Trying to compare the Heat to anything that has ever come before is an exercise in futility. You have the best player in the league, who happens to LOVE to pass teamed up with the second-or-third best player, who also is pretty fond of passing to the open man. They may both have had similar styles, but they ended up in those styles due to their teams' set-ups. How LeBron will act now that he can people to pass to who are good in their own right cannot be predicted with the information we have.

There's never been anything like it before. Every Heat game is going to be worth watching, especially against the crappy teams, because you don't know what sort of thing they'll bring out when they're way ahead. It wouldn't surprise me if they have regular season games where Miller shoots 20 3s and scores 30+ points, just because they think it'd be fun to do. This Heat team goes way beyond special into the realm of surreal."

That reminded me of a Chase Stuart post at PFR in October 2007:

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One common observation about the new-look Miami Heat goes something like this:

• Dwyane Wade is a great perimeter player who makes his living attacking the basket. He's unstoppable when he drives into the lane, but not as good when you force him to shoot a jump shot.
• LeBron James is also a great perimeter player who makes his living attacking the basket. He, too, is unstoppable when he drives into the lane, but not as good when you force him to shoot a jump shot.
• Won't this redundancy in skills make the Heat easier to defend?

If only we could quantify this dilemma, find similar situations in the past where two hard-driving teammates joined forces, and see if their offenses were as potent as expected...

Oh, wait, we can.

Enter good old Free Throw Rate (FTA/FGA). Because the majority of fouls are assessed on interior shooting attempts and/or aggressive offensive plays, FTR is actually a pretty good indicator of where a player likes to operate from on offense. Players like Glen Rice and Dennis Scott were known for their low FTRs because they took a ton of perimeter jumpers, shots on which a foul would land you in the serious doghouse. And at the other end of the spectrum there's Reggie Evans, whose legendary FTRs tell the story of a player who rarely attempts a shot outside of point-blank range. Obviously there are some players who are exceptions to this rule, but the majority of players' inside-outside tendencies can be described simply by looking at FTA/FGA.

So that should be the starting point in examining the issue of hard-driving teammates. The next step is to compare everyone's FTR to some universal standard, and to do that I borrowed this method from PFR's Doug Drinen. I don't want to bore you with the details, but it basically compares everyone to the league average; 100 is average, numbers greater than 100 mean the player attacks the rim more than the average player, and numbers under 100 mean the player is less aggressive than the average player. The theory is that if we just look at these "FTR Index" numbers for perimeter players (PG, SG, SF), we can find players who drove to the basket the most, which best describes LeBron and D-Wade's playing style.

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Click here for the Eastern Conference Preview

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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In the comments section of our Eastern Conference Preview, a reader asked for the minutes played distribution that was used for our projections. Please see the complete table after the jump.

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You didn't think we'd let the season begin without linking our favorite uniform guru's preview, did you? Over at ESPN, Paul Lukas breaks down all of the offseason changes that have nothing to do with roster movement, and yet feel only slightly less important... It's the 2010 Uni Watch NBA Preview!