Looking at Houston's stats and comparing the correlated WS to their WS last season. Harden's is about right, but expect precision to be low as one change in ranking has a huge impact on correlated WS. Howard's correlated WS is much higher than his WS last season (I'm actually amazed that Howard's defensive WS/min was slightly better than Rondo's) Parsons correlated WS is lower than WS last season. Asik...surprisingly a good correlation. Lin is underrated according to WS. Beverley correlated WS is slightly higher than his WS last season. I expect Beverley will play about 3.5 times as many minutes as he did last season. So ESPN either is predicting an injury, Beverley playing about 1/3 as good last season, or is completely undervalueing Beverley. Garcia's correlated WS is about what he did last year despite not being in rotation until very end of season after trade. DMo is projected to have a decent bump to fringe rotation player. Brewer seems in line. Jones his correlated WS is lower. Brook's seems in line with last season, but may not get the minutes. Everyone else's correlated WS's are so low that they are inconsequential. Casspi's WS last season was low, but more than inconsequential. If he was as good as he was in 25 min in Sac, he is underrated by a good 100 spots. Based on being in a better situation, he may be underrated by even more than that.
I guess I "underrated" them because their 1-2 punch was not as good as other elite teams. But they probably have the most balanced starting lineup.
So I went ahead and did this for last season as well, using (again) preseason #NBARank. It doesn't account for the Harden trade, or Derrick Rose never playing, etc. Another difference is last year's rankings included many free agent players, so I adjusted the rankings to only include players who were signed on with a team during last year's preseason. TEAM CNT Top12 Wins 6 through 12 3 through 5 Top 2 ---- --- ---------- ------------ ----------- ----- MIA 14 65.2 17.0 20.7 27.5 OKC 15 61.0 13.8 20.7 26.5 LAL 15 59.9 10.2 23.4 26.3 LAC 14 56.1 18.5 14.2 23.5 SAS 15 54.7 19.1 16.8 18.9 BOS 14 53.7 15.3 18.4 20.1 DEN 15 50.6 17.6 18.2 14.9 NYK 13 50.2 16.3 14.8 19.1 CHI 13 50.0 10.5 19.1 20.4 MIN 13 48.5 16.2 14.0 18.4 MEM 14 47.8 10.7 20.1 17.0 DAL 15 47.4 16.2 15.1 16.1 BRK 14 47.1 10.5 17.8 18.8 IND 16 43.7 11.1 17.6 15.1 PHI 12 42.5 12.9 13.5 16.1 GSW 15 41.6 13.3 14.1 14.2 ATL 13 38.3 8.2 14.3 15.9 UTA 14 38.2 11.3 13.3 13.6 MIL 14 37.9 11.9 12.9 13.1 TOR 14 35.8 10.4 12.4 13.0 SAC 14 34.3 11.1 10.0 13.2 PHX 11 33.0 8.3 12.2 12.6 WAS 14 31.9 7.5 11.3 13.1 NOP 12 31.3 6.0 11.2 14.1 ORL 16 30.5 8.9 11.3 10.3 <font style="background:yellow;color:black">HOU 19 29.9 7.7 11.0 11.3</font> DET 14 29.8 9.9 8.5 11.4 POR 14 28.7 3.8 9.0 15.9 CLE 16 27.5 6.1 6.2 15.2 CHA 12 22.7 6.9 8.4 7.4 Last year, again, we were by far ahead in the number of players on our roster that was ranked by #NBARank (again with 19). And here were the projected standings: Conf TEAM Top12-WS Conf TEAM Top12-WS 1 E MIA 65.2 W OKC 61.0 2 E BOS 53.7 W LAL 59.9 3 E NYK 50.2 W LAC 56.1 4 E CHI 50.0 W SAS 54.7 5 E BRK 47.1 W DEN 50.6 6 E IND 43.7 W MIN 48.5 7 E PHI 42.5 W MEM 47.8 8 E ATL 38.3 W DAL 47.4 9 E MIL 37.9 W GSW 41.6 10 E TOR 35.8 W UTA 38.2 11 E WAS 31.9 W SAC 34.3 12 E ORL 30.5 W PHX 33.0 13 E DET 29.8 W NOP 31.3 14 E CLE 27.5 <font style="background:yellow;color:black">W HOU 29.9</font> 15 E CHA 22.7 W POR 28.7
Pretty remarkable from last year what Chicago was able to do with so little talent, and what little the Lakers were able to do with so much talent. The Rockets are sort of the freakish team to look at on here because of the Harden trade. If you take the 5 to 6 pts he might add (generously) they'll be right there in the middle of the pack. I find this stuff very interesting... thanks Durv
Sounds like it's a more reasonable approach than adding up the individual RAPM stats, even though individually RAPM seems to be a more robust one.
The cool thing is that our player rankings have increased uniformly across the roster, not just for the top few players. Projected win shares for players 6-12 increased from 7.7 last year to 10.3 this year. Projected win shares for players 3-5 increased from 11.0 last year to 17.2 this year. And projected win shares for our top 2 players increased from 11.3 last year to 25.0 this year. Often, teams have to sacrifice depth in order to obtain their stars. We were able to obtain stars while also improving our depth.
Yeah, we'll see how they hold up. Like I said in the first post, this incorporates more of a subjective feel for how good a season the players will have, which could be an advantage or disadvantage depending on how you look at it.
Close your eyes and imagine an awesomely solid red line that starts in the bottom left hand corner of your imagination and moves up and to the right beyond your vision, or even your peripheral vision, forever and ever into eternity. There's your graph.
