The Build Final (Final Pre-season Predictions now with Corrections)

Posted on 10/28/2010 by

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Anyone can err, but only the fool persists in his fault — Marcus Tullius Cicero, Philippica XII, ii, 5
So reader sportsfanatic613 points out:
I love this work. Thank you so much. Currently, my question is why Nene (Hilario) does not seem to be included on the Denver Nuggets roster. I didn’t think that he was out for the season. Thus when adding in his statistics, Denver will be rated slightly higher.
……..
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Filth Flarn Filth

For those who wound up here by mistake

He’s right of course. I’m an idiot and I screwed up. But as Cicero counseled, I will not persist in my error, I will correct it. So I need to correct/update:
  • The Full Projection of every player by adding Nene and adjusting the minutes for the Nuggets
  • The Team Win projections
  • The comparison to other models
  • The comparison to over unders
I’m going to add some new stuff (i.e a comparison to SHOENE) just so I don’t feel like an abject failure. Remember boys and girls (?), always proofread the stuff you write after midnight.
Also for all my great readers, particularly those who love to play with tables, I’m putting it all in a google doc.
Oh and sportsfanatic613, thanks and you get to ask for the post of your choice.
The Build Final

So here’s the corrected Build after I add in Nene Hilario (go here for the Basics behind it all). There were a lot of factors to consider:

  • Projecting veteran player performance (the veteran model)
  • Projecting for rookies who played in college (the rookie model).
  • Projecting for everyone else using the preseason
  • Rosters, Minute allocations and Injuries (wait for it)
  • The difference between conferences (see here)

This puts it all together.  I did a first simple build (NBA Now Team Rankings take 1) then added some complexity for version #2 (and a Nene-less build v.3).

The Final Build is here.

Let go one by one.
The Corrected Player Projection (Now with more Nene)

There are 436 players currently on NBA rosters. I’ve done projection (accounting for age,performance,injuries & depth charts) for 436 players. Every single one.

Some notes:

  • Blake Griffin was adjusted to the high end of his projection based on his pre-season performance. Didn’t help the clippers much.
  • Durant and Westbrook were projected based on the last 41 games of last year.
  • I went high on CP3 minutes, low on Yao minutes based on the Rockets minutes restrictions, low on Oden and Aldridge minutes, I also gave Scalabrine playing time.

    Did you know he's now a Bull?

  • I used ShamSports combined with ESPN for depth charts. Some teams (I’m looking at you Indiana) was kinda like throwing darts at random.


The full build follows:

Today, I modeled the entire NBA. What did you do?

The 2010-2011 Win Projection (as of 10/28/10)

The final preseason 2011 projection now looks like this:

As before, Portland is my number one overall seed for the season and yes I am predicting the Wizards to win only ten games. Still shocking I know. The big differences:

Denver improved 8 games to eight seed in the west at the expense of the Rockets,Twolves,Nets,76ers,Blazers,Kings,Raptors and Jazz who all lost one game.

As for the Predictions vs the Lines :

The real change is with the Nuggets, every thing else is still pretty much the same. The Wizards line is still open for those into that sort of thing.

The Awards picks don’t change:

Comparing to other Models

Yesterday I also compared my model to to other models across the Web. I used Basketball Reference set of projections. Some detail on what they did:

Today at the request of Chicago Tim I added Basketball Prospectus SCHOENE model.

I put them all in one table with my model and sorted by the avg difference. The result is as follows:

The table shows my model, SCHOENE and the WS and +/- models from Basketball Reference, the absolute difference from their 3 models to mine and finally the average difference between my model and SCHOENE, +/- and WS models. Only 5 teams now show a difference greater than 7 games.

The Nuggets still get killed by playing Harrington and injuries to their bigs (although not as much). The Kings I like because of Dalambert and Cousins (and apparantly so does SCHOENE). The Wizards we’ve covered extensively. Golden State is the home of WP darlings (and SCHOENE likes them too) . My love for the Bulls offseason moves is well documented as well.  Portland and Orlando sit on the edge (SCHOENE agrees with me on Orlando and disagrees on Portland). If I look just at my model vs SCHOENE:

I’m more down on the Wizards. My age model is probably different from theirs on the Celts,  Lakers , Spurs,Suns and Hawks. My model is also not as high on the lower levels of the East.

You know what? I think this actually turned out well for everyone.

Happy Awesome

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