Archive for October, 2009

A couple of minor additions to point out:

• On the Player Season Finder, you can now choose "Advanced" as an output type. This will display all of the statistics found in the "Advanced" table found on the player pages.
• A link to the blog has been added to the Quick Index links (the links found just above the "You Are Here" line near the top of the page).

Have a nice weekend!

Reading The Book of Basketball made me remember my dad telling me about how awesome Dave Cowens was, which in turn prompted me to find some highlights:

More after the jump...

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Bill Simmons' new 700-page tome (and I just got it in the mail today, it's a legit 700 pages, there are no typeface shenanigans going on here) is called "The Book of Basketball", and the amount of work he put into it certainly lives up to the title's lofty aspirations. But for as many trees that had to die to make TBOB happen, is it so thick that it can stop a speeding bullet?

As you may or may not have seen, Tim Hardaway had his #10 jersey retired by the Miami Heat last night. I don't need to tell you that any discussion of Hardaway is invariably going to lead to (if not begin with -- heck,  look at this post) the topic of the homophobic remarks he made in February 2004 on Dan Le Batard's radio show. What Hardaway said was unquestionably wrong, hateful, & ignorant, but it's unfortunate that those comments have overshadowed Tim Bug's career, because when he was in his prime the man could really play. Let's evaluate how the merits of that play stack up against the standards of the Hall of Fame...

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A visual follow-up to Justin's earlier post:

Assuming all went well, the site should now be updated on a daily basis with the 2009-10 statistics. Along with the daily updates, here are a couple of other changes/additions you should be made aware of:

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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!

Click here for the Western 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…

Read the rest of this entry »