I put together some NBA Win projections, and had been just about to go on record with them when Jimmy Butler popped up with his demand to be traded away from Minnesota. I figured I’d wait since, otherwise they’d be obsolete before the pixels dried.
But, since no one knows what’s going on with the T-Wolves front office. I figured I would just move forward, and put my predictions out there.
This version of my predictions is using a combo of ESPN”s RPM and Jacob Goldstein’s Player Impact Plus Minus. Both use two years of ratings weighted two to one for the most recent year with additional adjustments for minutes played, changing teams and age. The two metrics are essentially weighted equally, though RPM has slightly more weight on defense and less on offense compared to PIPM. I then weighted each team’s strength by expected minutes and ran them through their schedule.
I solved the Jimmy Butler problem by removing him from the T-Wolves and replacing his minutes with a typical back up’s rating. If the Wolves get Josh Richardson, they will beat that estimate, but there is a significant chance they under perform that estimate, particularly given Thib’s love of 2018-19 vintage Derrick Rose. I did not add Butler to any team, so one lucky team should get a boost over these numbers (at some point).
Since I went a little lighter on obsessive line details and dropped my old Player Tracking Plus Minus, the following are my “Plausible Enough Win Predictions.” They are sorted by conference and predicted wins in descending order:
The projections have the race in the East as tight. Boston fans who think they’ve got a pre-paid ticket to the finals should be taking a couple of breaths.
The top of the west is projected as a two team race, but there’s a tight race projected for both the back end of the East and West playoffs. Interestingly, unless Butler moves to the Clippers, the expected wins for the eight seed in the East and West is almost identical.
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