Archive for the 'Win Shares' Category

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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Thanks to the alert eyes of one of our readers ("Deepak"), I have corrected a minor flaw in the Win Shares system. For those who don't care, feel free to move on. All others, please continue reading after the jump.

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Last November, we used Win Shares to look back at the players who took the floor alongside the most talented offensive players over the course of their careers. Unfortunately, in that article I only looked at offensive teammate quality, and we only had Win Shares going back to the 1973-74 season. Today, though, Justin's efforts have given us WS extending back to every season for which the NBA tracked minutes (through 1951-52, in case you were wondering). So I thought now would be as good a time as any to revisit the topic of teammate quality using offensive, defensive, and total Win Shares since 1952.

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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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Today's post topic comes courtesy of BBR reader Jared Rasmussen, who e-mailed us with this yesterday:

"Recently, especially this off-season, a lot of NBA role-players have been touring overseas. While many players have had overseas stints at some point in their careers, especially those who were drafted pre-D-League, some of the recent names are fairly relevant to NBA teams at the present.

I was wondering if there could be a blog based on the Win Shares of Josh Childress, Linas Kleiza, Von Wafer, and a lot of the 6th-12th bench players (and conceivably starters if any have gone overseas) to see the production that is being lost for the NBA franchise.

This suggestion comes today with the front-page news on Hoopshype.com that Cedric Simmons, Taurean Green, Alan Acker, and Kedrick Brown are all heading to Europe for the 2009-10 season."

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I have been working on a way to extend the Win Shares system to seasons prior to 1973-74 off and on (mostly off) for quite some time. Until last week, though, I had not been able to come up with a satisfactory solution. However, I had an idea last week that produced what I felt were satisfactory results, so today I would like to announce that the Win Shares system has been extended back to the 1951-52 season.

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A quick post/data dump for Friday... When I was putting together some of the Win Shares-based lists we've been posting recently, I wondered how heavily each team relied on their frontcourt and backcourt, and whether or not that correlated to success. So, first I added up WS by a team's guards and their non-guards, making each into a percentage. Here are the most guard-heavy teams in terms of production this decade:

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Recently, Football Outsiders listed their 25 most underrated and overrated players of the decade (BTW, is anyone even surprised that FO favorite Bobby "Mr. 3rd Down" Engram showed up high on the former list, or that longtime whipping boy DeShaun Foster topped the latter?), and it got me to thinking about assembling a similar list for the NBA.

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