Early Projection of 2015-16 Season

[JWash]

Not surprising to me based on how little he was used in the offense

Hard for him to impact the stat sheet when he touches the ball less often than his replacement player

Agreed. I think pretty much all Raptors fans agree Jonas needs to see more touches. Like... way more.

I think there's a Paul George or Jimmy Butler (or dare I say it... Harden?) esque breakout waiting inside the big Lithuanian if he'd just get the touches for it.

[Hotshot]

Not too bad in terms of projecting but I would put the Bucks much higher (Potential top 5 in East) While Dallas much lower ( Possibly missing the playoffs)

[JimiCliff]

Not surprising to me based on how little he was used in the offense

Hard for him to impact the stat sheet when he touches the ball less often than his replacement player

But he still scores 12 point or whatever per game. At a blistering TS%. Yet that score is Biyombo level. Doesn't make sense to me.

[tDotted]

Not too bad in terms of projecting but I would put the Bucks much higher (Potential top 5 in East) While Dallas much lower ( Possibly missing the playoffs)

As exciting as the Bucks will be, they won't crack the top 5 in the east. They're getting a bit overrated lately.

[S.R.]

As exciting as the Bucks will be, they won't crack the top 5 in the east. They're getting a bit overrated lately.

They're so young - they've got years of development ahead of them.

[psrs1]

Hi all,

With most of the big moves of free agency having settled down, and even a lot of role players off the market with a few notable exceptions, I thought I'd take a look at how the season projects out.

I'm using RPM here, ESPN's player impact statistic, and then using net points as a predictor for winning percentage using Pythagorean wins.

Quick walk through: first, I took the RPM value of every player in the league from last season. Didn't adjust them in any way, didn't project improvement or decay. Just last year's value.

Then I placed all the players on their current teams based on the off-season so far, and all the rumours I could track. Any players still unsigned I've left off completely for now. Most of them are either low impact or low minutes players so they shouldn't skew this too much.

I made no adjustments to minutes, or guesses on how playing time will change. I simply listed the players and their MPG from last season for each team. I tried using total minutes, but it became too difficult to adjust for players who missed large chunks of last season. By using MPG that fixes most of those issues (though not all, I'll touch on this later).

Then, having compiled all the players, their RPM and their minutes based entirely on last season, I created a MPG-weighted average RPM for every player on every team. This creates an automatic adjustment - I'm not taking an approach like WS and simply summing the WS of new players, as if their minutes need to be adjusted those numbers will obviously change. This approach simply assumes that if a team, based on their total MPG from last season, has too few minutes to go around, every player will have their minutes adjusted downwards proportionally. Probably not true, but there aren't any instances where this effect is extreme, so I think this is a reasonable approach.

This yields, for each team, an average RPM (I actually did dRPM and oRPM separately just for additional information). Those RPM values are then multiplied by 5 (as at any time, a team will effectively have 5 of their average player on the floor impacting the game). That value is added (or subtracted, for dRPM) from the league average ORTG last year (103) to give a predicted ORTG and DRTG for the team.

Then using the Pythagorean approach, win percentage is calculated (I used a power of 14.5, though 16 has been used as well). Multiply by 82 and you've got your number of wins.

Here is what the Raptors looked like, for example.

Player..................Team | MPG | ORPM | DRPM | O-impact | D-impact
DeMarre Carroll......TOR.....31.3......0.96 -0.25.........30.05 -7.83
Bismack Biyombo....TOR.....19.4.....-2.58 1.59........-50.05 30.85
Luis Scola.............TOR.....20.5.....-0.32 0.87..........-6.56 17.84
Cory Joseph..........TOR.....18.3......0.04 0.96............0.73 17.57
Kyle Lowry............TOR.....34.5......2.55 1.27..........87.98 43.82
James Johnson.......TOR.....19.6......0.33 1.66...........6.47 32.54
Patrick Patterson...TOR.....26.6......2.16 -1.82.........57.46 -48.41
DeMar DeRozan......TOR.....35.0......0.21 -0.36..........7.35 -12.60
Jonas Valanciunas...TOR.....26.2.....-1.72 1.05........-45.06 27.51
Terrence Ross........TOR.....25.5......1.75 -3.77........44.63 -96.14
Lucas Nogueira.......TOR.....3.8......-0.92 -0.34........-3.50 -1.29
Bruno Caboclo........TOR.....2.9......-1.43 -1.63........-4.15 -4.73

Total............................263.6............ ...............125.335 -0.881
Per player average RPM................0.475 -0.003
Net impact per 5 players...............2.377 -0.017
ORTG and DRTG..........................105.4 103.0
Win % 58%
Wins 47.7

(Sorry about the formatting there just can't get the table embedding to work).

So, I did that for every team. And ended up with these rankings.

Place |East |ORTG |DRTG |Wins
1 ATL 106.4 98.9 60.8
2 CLE 107.7 101.6 57.5
3 CHI 104.8 101.5 50.3
4 TOR 105.4 103.0 47.7
5 WAS 101.1 99.6 45.4
6 BOS 104.1 102.7 45.2
7 IND 103.2 104.0 38.7
8 MIA 103.6 105.3 36.2
9 DET 103.7 106.5 33.4
10 CHA 100.0 102.6 33.4
11 MIL 97.7 102.2 28.0
12 ORL 100.5 107.0 23.6
13 BKN 99.3 107.2 20.2
14 NY 100.2 109.9 16.9
15 PHI 94.6 106.6 12.3

Pos West ORTG DRTG Wins
1 GS 108.9 97.4 68.5
2 SA 108.1 97.8 66.5
3 DAL 109.4 103.4 56.8
4 MEM 105.1 101.0 52.4
5 OKC 106.9 102.8 52.2
6 LAC 107.7 103.6 52.2
7 NO 106.5 103.6 49.2
8 HOU 104.0 101.2 48.9
9 SAC 103.8 102.0 46.4
10 PHX 98.6 98.1 42.5
11 UTA 101.7 102.4 39.0
12 POR 101.1 101.9 38.6
13 DEN 101.6 108.0 24.1
14 LAL 100.9 110.4 17.5
15 MIN 98.6 108.2 16.9

Those results seem reasonable to me.

Some corrections I thought to make (they are not implemented above, that's the raw data there). Paul George returning to Indy using his RPM and MPG from 2013-14 would mean a jump of 7 wins, up to 5th right behind TOR. Chris Bosh returning to his 2013-14 RPM and MPG would mean a 3 win jump for MIA, which doesn't move them up the standings unless you don't do the Paul George adjustment. Kevin Durant doing the same would add 4 wins to OKC's total, moving them up one spot ahead of MEM. I didn't adjust for Melo, as he had a reasonable number of games and minutes and had his usual impact last season.

So, a couple promising things for Raptors fans: first, the Raptors project to have a top 10 offence again. And they project to improve to a league average defence. Hopefully they can make even larger strides based on improved systems, but it is heartening that purely on the strength of the personnel they are looking to make a 6-7 spot jump defensively. And it appears that the prediction of a struggling Raptors offence might be a little premature.

Another very promising consideration: the Raptors own the less valuable of the Knicks and Nuggets first round picks this coming draft. And this system places those two teams 3rd and 7th in the lottery. A 7th overall pick would be a pretty nice return for Andrea Bargnani.

I hope you liked this little early projection game. I tried to keep my own assumptions and biases completely out of it. Any questions are very welcome.

Great post and info. 4th seed seems about right.

[Axel]

Now we have an official competition between DanH's RPM projections and Sports Illustrated's Win Share projections (posted today). Basically the Raps need to win 49 games or more for SI to claim the win.

Great work Dan. Must have grinded your gears to see me post the SI version this afternoon considering the amount of work this must have been.

[Hotshot]

As exciting as the Bucks will be, they won't crack the top 5 in the east. They're getting a bit overrated lately.

Sure they are a bit overrated but they tend to overachieve and I think they will do so this year as well, if they even become a top 2 in the East I won't be shocked.

[DanH]

Now we have an official competition between DanH's RPM projections and Sports Illustrated's Win Share projections (posted today). Basically the Raps need to win 49 games or more for SI to claim the win.

Great work Dan. Must have grinded your gears to see me post the SI version this afternoon considering the amount of work this must have been.

Not at all. Was dragging my feet/taking my time thinking there might be more signings to come, but SI releasing theirs was a hint that I might as well just use the rosters as they are now.

[DanH]

Not surprising to me based on how little he was used in the offense

Hard for him to impact the stat sheet when he touches the ball less often than his replacement player

Plus as a lane clogging big he just doesn't fit well with DeMar, who wants to use that space to drive AND is unable to spread the floor for JV to operate in the post.

[Axel]

Not at all. Was dragging my feet/taking my time thinking there might be more signings to come, but SI releasing theirs was a hint that I might as well just use the rosters as they are now.

Bigger man than I, I would have been kicking myself for letting some copy and paste hack steal my thunder

[thead]

Bucks really could go either way I suppose. Nobody needed a change of scenary more than Greg Monroe and Kidd will know how to get the most out of him. I could see 30 wins just as easily as I could buy 48 - 50 wins for them.

[Scraptor]

Good post Dan. This is why I'm a little hesitant to say we upgraded in a big way this offseason... People are underestimating the impact of losing Amir Johnson (+1.83, 21st among 95 PFs listed) and Lou Williams (+2.52, 12th among 100 SGs listed).

I don't like how much Amir got paid given the state of his ankles, but Danny Ainge is not an idiot. And as much as Lou chucked, he did bail us out frequently.

On the bright side, I think we're a little more robust for the playoffs, and if Melo sucks even a little we're looking at a top 10 pick.

[KeonClark]

Good post Dan. This is why I'm a little hesitant to say we upgraded in a big way this offseason... People are underestimating the impact of losing Amir Johnson (+1.83, 21st among 95 PFs listed) and Lou Williams (+2.52, 12th among 100 SGs listed).

I don't like how much Amir got paid given the state of his ankles, but Danny Ainge is not an idiot. And as much as Lou chucked, he did bail us out frequently.

On the bright side, I think we're a little more robust for the playoffs, and if Melo sucks even a little we're looking at a top 10 pick.

I too think were basically as good as last year, but don't see a sweep or extremely early exit. I am more optimistic in my general outlook because of the youthful pool of talent including JV, bruno, wright, powell, bebe, nyk/den 1st, 3 more firsts.

[RYE]

Just stop. Seriously.

we should trade DeRozan and fire Casey

I mean the only team that sticks out to me that may progress well beyond what is show here would be Milwuakee