Archive for January, 2010

In case you missed it, the All-Star reserves were named yesterday, completing the rosters (barring injury replacements). Here are the teams (and snubs, according to this post) for each conference, along with some fun APBRmetric stats:

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Rising: Raptors (W-MIL, W-LAL, W-MIA, W-@NYK), Grizzlies (W-OKC, W-ORL, W-@DET)
Falling: Thunder (L-@MEM, L-@CLE, L-CHI), Heat (W-@WAS, W-SAC, L-CLE, L-@TOR)

(Want to know how the BBR Rankings are calculated? Read this first... "MLE" = Maximum Likelihood Estimate.)

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In honor of the long 2-week layoff between the NFL's conference championship games and a little event I like to call the Super Bowl, I was thinking about what the NBA would be like if it was structured the same way as the NFL -- 16-game schedules, heavy divisional play with a set rotation of intraconference division matchups, 6 teams from each conference make the playoffs, etc. What if the 2009-10 season so far was structured that way? Who would win the NBA's Super Bowl?

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For every season since 1979, the ESPN College Basketball Encyclopedia lists recruiting guru Bob Gibbons' top high school seniors, ranked 1-20. Every so often, I'm going to highlight these top prospects from a given year and take a look at what happened to them, as well as throw out the names of some players who may have slipped through the recruiting cracks but emerged as stars anyway. We'll start with the Year 2000, and a group whose best player (by far) wasn't even ranked among the 50 best prospects in the country...

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Today I wanted to tackle the question of "team talent" -- which team has the most, and which team wins the most with the least? Unfortunately, there's no real way to quantify "raw talent" in a sense of "what is Player X's basketball potential right now?" The best you could do is to look at past years and regress to the mean for a projection, which we did a lot over the past offseason when attempting to predict player performance in 2009-10. But that's a different way to define "talent" than I wanted to look at here -- that method assumes a player has at least shown some flashes of potential in the past, upon which you can base future expectations. But about players who are still considered prospects despite having done nothing at the NBA level? In cases like that, I suppose the only way to really capture "talent" is to use draft position as a proxy, since draft decisions are made on the basis of raw talent the majority of the time. So who are the teams right now with the best collection of talent, based on where their players were drafted?

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Rising: Nuggets (W-UTA, W-@GSW, W-LAC), Thunder (L-@DAL, W-MIA, W-@ATL, W-@MIN)
Falling: Spurs (L-@CHA, L-@MEM, W-@NOH, L-UTA), Warriors (L-MIL, W-CHI, L-DEN)

(Want to know how the BBR Rankings are calculated? Read this first... "MLE" = Maximum Likelihood Estimate.)

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Thanks once again to the research of Pete Palmer — and a little clean-up work by yours truly — we now have college statistics for almost every player who played in the NBA from the 1979-80 season forward. Prior to this update we had college statistics for almost every player who was drafted from 1980 forward, plus college statistics for most all-time greats, but this update fills in many of the blanks in our database. As always, please let us know if you have any comments or questions.

Recently I received an e-mail from a user who wanted to know what the average weight of each team was, so I decided to do one better and post the minute-weighted average ages and heights for every team as well. Just click on the column headers to sort by each category:

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Tonight's the night we'll finally know this year's All-Star starters -- and if the balloting updates are any indication, we'll be seeing monsieurs Tracy McGrady and Allen Iverson occupying 2 of the coveted slots after a great deal of, um, questionable fan support. Even Ray Allen, himself going through a down year by conventional numbers, spoke out about how messed up it is for the fans to vote in players who have no business being All-Stars. On the other hand, I have no doubt that this situation will be magically rectified by the league before tonight's announcement. I mean, you don't really think they'd let McGrady start, do you? How embarrassing would that be?

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From SI.com, are the 1972-73 Sixers the bizarro version of the '72 Miami Dolphins on the playing surface and off? The so-called "worst team of all time" (or at least the team with the worst record) is actually rooting for their pathetic new challengers, this year's Nets, to win games and not claim their dubious record. Even weirder, they're doing it for selfish reasons:

"For me, as an inconsequential sports marketer, who at the time was just starting out, it is my Cal Ripken," [Andy] Dolich said. "I will be the saddest person in the country if they break this record."

Apparently you can build a career by being associated with the worst team in NBA history. Who knew?