A couple weeks ago, yahoo.com used basketballreference’s 2013-14 winshares/48 minute projections to estimate the number of wins the Jazz will end up with this coming year. Even though the author of that article did his math wrong (he should have ended up with 36, rather than 28 wins), I thought it was an interesting idea (flawed, but interesting enough to play around with)– one with concrete elements (individual minutes & production) that we could use to guesstimate/argue about the number of wins the Jazz will have this year.
All you need to do is figure out how many minutes you think each player will play and estimate their WS48. If you give me these numbers, I’ll plug it into the formula and tell you how many wins the Jazz should end up with.
Basically, WS/48 works like this:
.200 = true superstar production
.150 = very solid, efficient production
.100 = average production
.050 = well below average production/efficiency
.000 = might as well be in the D-League
You can go into basketballreference.com’s website and look at past and projected production for individual players, if you like. Or you can ignore those stats altogether and just give your personal estimate of a player’s 2013-14 production according to the WS48 framework. Just remember, that this is a per-minute type of metric. It doesn’t matter how many minutes a player plays, just how productive they are per minute.
For estimating minutes played, estimate number of minutes a player will have per total team games (82), not per games a player plays in. Thus if you think a player will be injured, or otherwise receive DNPs, you need to lower their averages. Most importantly, make sure the total team minutes add up to 240.
Here’s my estimates:
Hayward 31 minutes, 0.140 WS/48
Favors 30, .125
Kanter 27, .110
Burks 25, .065
Burke 20, .030
Rush 20, .090
Lucas 17, .045
Evans 14, .110
Williams 14, .080
Biedrins 13, .070
Jefferson 11, .065
Clark 8, .050
Gobert 6, .070
McNeal 4, .030
That computes to 36.0 wins (essentially the same number of wins as Yahoo article, even though I made somewhat different WS48 and minutes projections). Doesn't really add up to a tank.
Whose minutes or WS/48 do you think I’m off on? As I say, give me your own estimates, and I’ll compute how many wins they add up to.
For WS48 reference, last year’s leaders:
Lebron 0.322
Durant 0.291
T. Chandler 0.207
Parker 0.206
Harden .206
M. Gasol .197
From Northwest and Pacific divisions, here are players who last year were WS48:
Near .150: N. Collison, K. Martin, Sefolosha, Lawson, Gallinari, Millsap, A. Jefferson, Hickson, Kirilenko, D. Jordan, M. Barnes, C. Landry, D. Lee
Near .100: Liggins, Iguodala, C. Brewer, Mozgov, J. Hamilton, Kanter, Batum, M. Leonard, W. Matthews, W. Green, C. Butler, Bogut, Biedrins, P. Gasol, S. Blake, T. Evans, D. Cousins, Dragic, Dudley, Scola
Near .050: J. Lamb, D. Fisher, Burks, Babbitt, Barea, Duhon, Fredette, A. Brooks, F. Garcia, Mark. Morris, Telfair, S. Brown
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