Now that the season is underway and we have a little bit of data, I decided to unveil what I hope will be a running feature for this blog, ranking all the teams based on their performance.
Draw your own conclusions as to why this is here
Fairly soon we will have the Automated Wins Produced site for 2010-2011 (and we can say this ranking is powered by NerdNumbers) and a sufficiently large sample from the season to use it as our only basis for the rankings but for now where going to need to do some scrambling.
First, I need to update the Wins Produced numbers (the Basics are here) for the season so far. I will caution as before, that all these numbers are preliminary (the position adjustment is estimated) and from a very small size. I used numbers from dougstats (who really deserves kudos for awesome data).
Props (and a shoutout to those looking for funny pictures of cats)
I used stats for the NBA as of 10/31/2010. Here are the WP numbers so far sorted by team:
What does it mean? Here’s the updated Top 30 in WP48 (>10 minutes per game) so far:
Millsap and Odom join the top of the list. Noah, Evans, Westbrook & Batum are still playing awesome. CP3 is still not dogging it at all. Monta slips after a tough matchup and Anthony Tolliver shows up at 30 (proving that Rambis may not be completely insane, although here’s and idea how about Love at 4 and Tolliver at 5, forget I said that and trade KLove as quickly as possible to the Celts 
). Again small sample size.
So the first part of the rankings is based on how everyone played so far, the second is based on my final preseason projection. Why should my preseason predictions hold any weight? Take a look:
To explain, I took the raw wins predictions for each team combined it with the equation for home team winning I came up with for a single game (see here for detail). To put it simply:
Probability of Home team winning a game = (Projected Wins Home Team-Projected Wins Road Team)/82 +.606
Then I worked it out for every game so far as follows:
- If W% is greater than 60% call it a strong Win (W) for the home team
- If W% is greater than 50% but less than 60% call it a weak Win (WW) for the home team
- If W% is greater than 40% but less than 50% call it a weak Loss (WL) for the home team
- If W% is less than 40% call it a strong Loss (L) for the home team
I then did the math for al the models I’d looked at previously (see here again) and also included just picking the home team. The result is as follows:
So yeah.
Paul is dead. Long live the Build?
No more foreplay, let’s get to the Rankings.
NBA Now Rankings Week #1
The top 10 sees a lot of action. The Heat and Lakers both pass the Blazers to go 1,2. OKC, Denver and Dallas thunder up the chart and overtake the Spurs. The Hornets are who I thought they were and so far the Grizzlies are the surprise team. Chicago is holding on to a spot in the top 10 (barely) and face a big test tonight in Portland.
11 thru 20 sees the Celtics and Warriors falling 6 spots of the back of losses. The Raptors are the clear surprise in this group. The Jazz are barely holding on on the back of their victory at OKC which for them hopefully is a sign of things to come and not the exception.
As for the bottom 10, Orlando is the biggest surprise. They looked horrid against Miami and other than Howard,Gortat,Q-Rich and Vince Carter everyone else has played poorly.
And before you degenerates ask :
I'm just leaving this here
Hopefully this series will catch on.
Image courtesy of xkcd.com
Note: Hey, don’t look now, but the Automated Wins Produced site is updated with 2001 thru 2005 numbers and 2011 numbers.
Oh and the Godfather of WOW posted his handcrafted review of 2009-2010
Let it be noted that Arturo beat the Machine
The next set of weekly rankings will be powered by Nerd Numbers
As for this week, here’s how they look using the Automated Numbers:
Top 10: It’s now Miami,Portland, Lakers then the Mavs ,Hornets,Nuggets and Hawks all move up. The Bulls, Celts, and Spurs fall but stay in the top 10
11-20: The freaking Raptors. Orlando is who we thought they were. OKC and GSW took a hit from the last game.
21-30: The Wiz get a .5 win from me adding it in to get to 1230 wins (82 games times 15), they’re not the worst so far as the Clippers seem to be going the wrong way.
Chicago Tim
11/01/2010
Sorry to sound dense, but what is “WL” and “WW”?
arturogalletti
11/01/2010
CT,
WL: Weak Loss (between 40% to 50% probability)
WW: Weak Win (between 50% to 60% probability)
Raspu10
11/01/2010
Not all players on a team play in all games the team plays
arturogalletti
11/01/2010
I know, I know. I’m probably going to end up doing week to week.
Matt
11/01/2010
This will be fun.
Jimbo (Australia)
11/01/2010
I just wish I had some spare cash to make some money with….
arturogalletti
11/01/2010
You know, I can’t actually find a site that takes straight no spread bets on NBA games. Strictly for experimental purposes of course.
some dude
11/01/2010
Rashard Lewis WP48 is scary. for a guy making as much as he is, he has to be at least average. If he’s going to keep declining at this rate, orlando is in big trouble.
I watched a fare amount of the Clippers play so far this year. In the 1st half they seem fine, but they fall apart in the 2nd half of games. I’m wondering if they’re the worst team in the league.
arturogalletti
11/01/2010
SD,
I’d hold out for a larger sample size. Clippers played Portland, GS and Dallas. That’s pretty rough. Their first realistic W is nov 12 (Detroit)
Suomynona
11/01/2010
Lewis hasn’t really been good since he was caught “accidentally” taking a banned substance. That contract was questionable when they gave it to him, but it’s looking worse and worse. I agree that they need him to be decent to have any shot at the championship.
I love the blog arturo. It has quickly become one of my favorite places for intelligent basketball discussions. Keep up the good work!
arturogalletti
11/02/2010
Thanks ! I try.
Rashard’s contract is epically bad. It’s like the Magic wanted to compete with the ex-ABA teams for competitive disadvantage (look up the Spirits of St. Louis if curious).
Mark Wylie
11/02/2010
Has a negative wins producer ever been paid (second highest in the league) so much?
http://hoopshype.com/salaries.htm
arturogalletti
11/02/2010
MW,
That is a good question. I don’t think so. There’s a chance he’ll improve but I really don’t think so. Horrible,horrible contract.
Fred Bush
11/02/2010
Holy cow. At first when I saw that you were setting up a wager with Haralobos I thought, dude is out of his league, but those win percentages are frickin’ amazing.
arturogalletti
11/02/2010
Fred,
Sadly, that didn’t end up happening (my bad for not setting it up). I got busy at my real job
Fred Bush
11/02/2010
And how about altering the win percentages to account for back-to-back games?
arturogalletti
11/02/2010
I’ll play with some tweaks as the season goes along. League strength is one. Back to back is another (anyone know win percentages for back to back or do I need to go look it up on bref?). I’m also monitoring point differential to see if i can throw in some modeling around that (say for example an 80% win probability for HTeam gives you a 70% at a 5 point win).
reservoirgod
11/02/2010
If LAC doesn’t beat DET or NJN, then they might start the NBA season w/out a win in Oct & Nov. The big question surrounding the Clippers is – Will Blake Griffin re-sign when he becomes eligible for free agency (obviously not – unless he’s dumb as CP3) and What will Blake Griffin’s next team be?