2024 Win Projections

Last year I went 21-9 against Vegas [1]. My win delta was 5.9, compared to Vegas' 6.3 [2]. Despite my best two bets on the board missing, I’d call it a fairly median result. As I mentioned last year, I have a great deal of respect for Vegas where there is high volume allowed and a short turnover, and not a lot of respect where there is low volume and your money is tied up all season. I suspect I’ll be able to win about ⅔ of these bets going forward, but the juice and the length of the bet settlement will keep me from overspending my winnings on hookers and blow.

At first glance I expected Vegas to be a bit sharper this year, but I’m about .43 wins off per team, where last year I was only .40 off per team. This might be attributable to my unwillingness to disagree with the market *too* much last season. This year, I erred on the side of accuracy rather than forcing myself to add a few wins to the tire fire that is the Detroit Pistons.

One of the first things I had some trouble with is trying to model teams at the extremes. I would imagine there’s a difficult to quantify rubber band effect happening, just as there is during regular season games. The front office might (or might not!) have the luxury of waiting for regression, but even if a losing streak is caused by shooting luck the players and coaches are considering every possible adjustment. NBA teams play fairly hard, but some play a little harder. The resulting sense of urgency should compress every team a bit closer to the middle class.

Something that interested me this year is the team wide effects that I wish I had a better handle on. Two of them that stand out are from teams that I’m higher than market, the Raptors and the Nets.

For the Raptors, I’m worried about their spacing. To quantify my worry, I made a very simple spacing score for all teams coming into this season. To get this spacing score, I used last year’s stats and combined volume and accuracy from 3 pro rated for the minutes I'm projecting [3]. This is *extremely* crude and doesn’t include incoming rookies, but the scores do a good job of quantifying about how much spacing you’d expect teams to have.

MIL 3.46

BOS 3.42

GSW 3.14

DAL 3.08

IND 2.96

The top 5 teams include spacing big men and high volume off the dribble shot creation. This method easily passes the smell test for the best spacing teams in the league.

Now peep the bottom 5 teams, paying special attention to the outliers at the bottom.

DET 2.27

LAL 2.25

BKN 2.21

NOP 1.98

TOR 1.85

The bottom 5 teams include some suspect roster building and a reliance on this year's draft to contribute to spacing, rarely a good bet.

Though the Nets don't look very good on this list, I’m actually more worried about their lack of creation. To quantify my worry, I just looked at last year’s USG pro rated for the minutes I’m projecting [4]. The result is irrelevant on the high end (additions like Jrue Holiday and Damian Lillard show the Celtics and Bucks up top), but on the low end it's notable how much Brooklyn sticks out:

BKN 18.66

MEM 19.25

MIN 19.28

CHI 19.47

GSW 19.56

I'll hand wave away every other score except how big of an outlier the Nets are. They’ll be relying on a massive increase in workload from Mikal Bridges, which some people may consider him more capable of than I do, and a strong season from Spencer Dinwiddie, who has torn his ACL twice and was medically red flagged in the draft. Ben Simmons also plays for the team.

I underscore these problems with the Raptors and Nets primarily to expose the difficulty in projecting teams as a product of individual players. It's more useful to see them as an organism that needs a certain amount of creation, spacing, rebounding, and defense [5].

In that vein, the Timberwolves are another conundrum that comes to mind. It was clear last year that as a frontcourt Towns and Gobert wouldn’t be greater than the sum of their parts, but it’s hard to quantify overlapping roles. I’ll have them as a little worse than my projection last season, but not quite as low as the market has them this year.

And that leads me to my final point. As much as I’d love to rely solely on machines [6], I think the NBA is a sphere where there’s a bit too much of the human element at work to not think I can improve the model with some common sense adjustments [7]. I made notes last year where I made the biggest manual adjustments, and they were largely big upgrades on machine alone. Wisdom of the crowds has been proven to be very wise, and there are some instances where I try take into account public sentiment on a player before that player truly arrives and it shows up in advanced stats.

The best publicly available win projections are back:

Atlantic		Central		Southeast
Celtics	58.1	Bucks	50.8	Hawks	44.7
76ers [8]	51.8	Cavaliers	49.3	Heat	41.8
Knicks	47.5	Pacers	36.3	Magic	37.2
Raptors	42.4	Bulls	35.3	Hornets	31.5
Nets	40	Pistons	21.7	Wizards	25.5
Northwest		Pacific		Southwest
Nuggets	49.9	Suns	48.9	Grizzlies	44.6
Twolves	47	Warriors	46.8	Pelicans	44.1
Thunder	39.5	Lakers	44	Mavericks	42.7
Jazz	37.9	Clippers	42.2	Rockets	35.3
Trailblazers	29.7	Kings	39.3	Spurs	24.3

[1] Though it should be noted that a half dozen of those came within 2 wins, I was even on the close ones as well.

[2] This is how many wins I was off on average from the actual result, obv.

[3] 3PA/100 * 3% * MIN / team minutes. It should be noted that I’m projecting about 85-90% of team minutes, where the remainder go to replacement level players. Or in James Wiseman’s case, below replacement level.

[4] USG * MIN / team minutes

[5] You could break this down much further into things like at rim finishing, at rim defense, off the dribble shooting, etc etc. Dereliction in any area can leave you vulnerable to predictability, an NBA no-no.

[6] Unlike most forms of poker, which are solved af.

[7] The base of this model is EPM, which passes the smell test as the best available one number metric. I've added an aging curve, taken into account other publicly available advanced stats, and added some common sense on players who have had injuries derail recent seasons.

[8] These projections assume that James Harden plays basketball for the Philadelphia 76ers. That, uh, seems unlikely.

High IQ

So much of what we learn about the extent of an NBA player’s ability is driven by opportunity. Steph Curry freed from the shackles of Monta Ellis. Nikola Jokic no longer sharing a front court with Jusuf Nurkic. Most recently, Tyrese Haliburton leading the league in assists after his trade to Indiana. Perhaps most notably for this article, Linsanity.

Every year there are many such players in the NBA, but this year one sticks out above the rest. Immanuel Quickley’s ability has been overshadowed by the coaching of Tom Thibodeau, the signing of Jalen Brunson, and the play style of Julius Randle.

The most overrated ‘type’ [1] of NBA player is the undersized shooting guard. They score points, but they don't scale well to the playoffs because they aren’t quite good enough at distributing and defending. The classic example of this mold has always been Lou Williams, though his foul drawing meant that the juice was often worth the squeeze (at least in the regular season)[2]. In this mold we have three young guards that are nearly the same age, recently got lucrative extensions, and seem destined to frequently be compared to each other: Tyler Herro, Jordan Poole, and Anfernee Simons.

But hiding in an Empire State building sized shadow is Immanuel Quickley. He not only may be better than all 3, but breaks the undersized gunner mold with superior passing and defense.

Here’s an age 22 (last season) comparison between the four players. I chose to use last year’s numbers because it’s more of an apples to apples comparison; this year Quickley’s usage has been depressed further by the arrival of Brunson. Herro has improved, Poole has declined, but largely these numbers look similar this year, sans Quickley’s volume.

You don’t need to study the table, a comparison between all of them will result in you thinking these players are quite similar.

The first takeaway I have is that it’s obvious Quickley is the superior passer, with both the highest AST% and lowest TO% of the bunch. The second is that it’s worth wondering whether Quickley can maintain efficiency at the higher usage that Herro, Poole, and Simons have. My bet is that he could: over the last two seasons in 1500 minutes without Randle or Brunson Quickley has 54.7 TS% on 24.7 USG% with 27.7 AST% and 9.3 TO%. His numbers in an increased role are on par or improved with a particularly impressive AST:TO ratio.

So he’s been able to scale his modest efficiency in larger role with even better distribution. There are sample size issues here, but I think any worry about him playing against backups is overblown: ⅔ of these minutes come with at least two opposing starters on the floor, where his numbers are the same. That argument didn’t hold water when dissenters didn’t think it was worth trading for James Harden a decade ago, and it doesn’t hold water here.

But offense is only half (probably more like ⅔!) of the battle.

And the other half is the Battle of Alesia [3], where Quickley is the only one to post a positive defensive season in BPM, EPM, or RAPTOR (with multiple in each!). The others’ defensive advanced stats rank between regular bad and Trae Young bad.

I abide by a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” rule when considering how good of a defender someone is. Check advanced stats, watch highlights on NBA twitter, and try to watch them closely in a midweek game in January against a .500 team. If those sources agree, I have at least some level of confidence in my opinion.

Now I’m certainly not claiming guard defense matters much, but in the playoffs there is a marked difference between the five alarm fire that happens when Jordan Poole gets put in a screening action, and the impressive resilience with which Steph Curry holds up with when faced with similar scrutiny. Quickley’s ability to be in the latter category is going to win his team some regular season games and may be the difference between a win and a loss in a playoff series when the chips are down.

This is a clip you may have seen from earlier in the year on Jamal Murray. Active hands, choppy steps, and not biting on the pump fake: the entire possession is defensive nirvana.

The effort is consistent. Here he topside’s both screens and seamlessly switches onto Pascal Siakam. Active hands, choppy steps, high effort closeout: he’s a one man defense![4]

And even in January against Indiana he’ll navigate multiple screens, stay attached, and force a turnover.

But the real reason I got motivated enough to write this blog is last weekend when R.J. Barrett was a late scratch and Quickley drew the primary defensive assignment on James Harden. In the Knicks 109-98 come from behind victory Harden ended just 4-11 for 12 points. I am certainly not proclaiming him a Harden stopper, and given that this was a Sunday early evening game that title may belong to the quality of adult entertainment in Manhattan, but in a role he isn’t suited for the result was impressive. That’s largely due to efforts like the first play of the game.

He understands angles, maintains good effort, and has great hands. He'll also fight for rebounds [5]. And that's why it doesn't even matter if he can't scale more usage or increase efficiency. The marginal value you get from the extra usage is wasted when this type of player isn't good enough at creation and defense to stay on the court when it matters (see Poole, Jordan, circa 2022 playoffs).

It’s all part of an impressive and versatile skillset that has allowed him to post 90th percentile on/off splits each season of his career: +8.1, +12.2, +8.9 per CtG, despite playing with a very diverse set of lineups. The package is there but the opportunity isn’t. Now that the trade deadline has passed, perhaps it never will be.

[1] I do hate generalizing like this, but for purposes of us using words to convey player values, I feel I have to.

[2] I have to be careful what I say here about Lou, who is a legend, and also one of Immanuel Quickley’s favorite players

[3] No fucking idea. I just googled “what is the most 1 sided battle in history.” Poor Gallic confederation.

[4] You will not often see a defensive highlight that ends in a wide open made 3 for the player in question’s primary assignment…

[5] He actually does get into guys, a rarity for smaller guards. I considered a highlight reel of IQ boxouts, but was shot down by my editor.

Best Publicly Available NBA Projections

With the surge in popularity of sports betting, NBA Win Totals have gone mainstream. It’s a useful exercise—a macro look at an NBA season which is long and filled with the variance of injuries, drama, and shot luck. While people love to predict sides, rarely do they want to set lines themselves, and even more rarely do they want to pony up their own money on it. Well, these are the best publicly available win projections. And I’ll bet on it [1].

Professionally [2], I live by a fairly easy motto: ABQ. Always Be Quantifying. So this year I went through every NBA team, aggregated minutes projections, added an aging curve to some of my favorite available one number metrics, and threw in a splash of subjective adjustment when necessary [3].

Often we think we know something the market doesn’t, but we don’t. The market is vast and its incentive structure (making money!) is robust. In this case, I know I don’t know anything that the market doesn’t. I’m just a guy, armed with some numbers and a bias toward liking NBA players that can pass, shoot, and try on defense.

This process surprised me (as good quantifying often does!). I didn’t expect to like the Hawks, or the Knicks, or the Raptors nearly as much as I do. I was shocked that I couldn’t find more wins for contenders like the Clippers or Bucks.

Most of these win projections don’t need much clarification: The Wolves, Mavericks, and Nuggets are 50 win teams. The Trailblazers, Wizards and Bulls are exceptionally mediocre. And the tankers are tanking [4].

This blog, of course, is not a suggestion that you should try to bet the penny stakes limits that cowardly sports betting sites will allow you to bet on season long win totals. But were you to be able to bet on such a thing, I’d be confident that you’d receive even more pennies back 6 months from now when those pennies will be worth even less due to inflation. But I digress.

The Good

Last year, the Pelicans had a neutral luck adjusted point differential without the best player on their team. Everyone on the roster except CJ McCollum is on the positive side of the aging curve, and one of the back end of the rotation guys is bound to pop as a positive contributor. Zion was the hardest player to project. Without a full season last year, do I give him a two year bump on his aging curve? Or should I assume he’s just been eating jambalaya and won’t improve at all without time on court? Luckily, Vegas is basically projecting them as if Zion won’t play, and I’ve got him projected for 2/3 of the season or so.

Though I don’t see the Raptors winning a playoff series with this version of the team, they’re one of the youngest teams in the league, play hard, and are well coached. They get very thin after their top 9– luckily Nick Nurse wouldn’t dream of going that deep into his bench! This is a 50 win team, with some upside from a larger than expected improvement from Achiuwa or Barnes.

The 76ers are no longer a niche pick to challenge for the top seed in the East. They’re good, deep, and not as reliant as you think on having Harden be an All-NBA level player. I have my reservations in the playoffs, but in the regular season this team will be a dynamo, provided the big fella stays healthy.

The Hawks, Knicks, and Kings are the three teams that surprised me the most. I don’t think the Hawks have much chance to win a playoff series, and I don’t think the Knicks or the Kings have much chance of making the playoffs, but the math is the math: they’re decent teams that go 10 deep. And Immanuel Quickley is one of the most underrated players in the league [5].

I have to write a quick paragraph about the Magic, the darlings of my basketball heart. Given my love for Franz Wagner, I tried as hard as possible to be conservative on my projections for this team. But I still like the over. While they're lacking the future resources of some of the other rebuilds, it's noteworthy how much better the Magic are right now than the Pistons, Rockets, and Thunder. Thankfully it looks like Jalen Suggs will be back for the start of the regular season, as a serious injury would have been a nightmare. If you moved 1000 of his minutes to RJ Hampton (one of the worst players in the league), it would be worth two wins!

The Bad

I would put the Bucks in my top tier of contenders this season (along with the Clippers and Celtics), but the regular season numbers just don’t show how the Bucks should be projected to win over 50 games. Wesley Matthews, George Hill, and Serge Ibaka are ready for taxidermy; Jevon Carter, Jordan Nwora, and MarJon Beauchamp are deer in the headlights. They may get a buyout guy, and Bud’s regular season preparation is as good as anyone’s, but even squinting only gets them to 50, and I see their line above that in most places.

The Rockets are part of an interesting phenomenon. When you project some of these particularly young teams who have a half dozen guys that are barely old enough to drink, a few of them will have outsized results, and those players will earn more playing time. But outliers are outliers because they’re outliers, and there isn’t much I can do beyond try to capture that by giving Jalen Green a little more of a bump than is expected by his aging curve, or pretending Josh Christopher might be able to play merely replacement level basketball instead of league worst type basketball. My raw win total on them without those adjustments was only 16! I do think with the rubberband effect along the poles this is a much more reasonable win projection, but I still don’t see how they get to the mid 20s (or why they'd be motivated to do so).

There’s actually a little bit of that same phenomenon happening with the Warriors. In my opinion, the Warriors young players aren’t particularly interesting. And despite that, one of them will likely be better than expected, and that one will earn rotation minutes alongside what’s left of the Death Lineup. The previous year’s NBA champion has gone under in 5 of the last 7 82 game seasons [6]. And teams with a win projection over 50 have gone under ⅔ of the time in the same sample (though teams with a low win projection have performed about the same as the field).

The Ugly

When incentive structures diverge, it gets hard to model. Some of these teams start this season with the mindset that a loss is a win[7]. It’s difficult to figure out the lengths that a team like the Jazz or Thunder might go to to get Wemby or Scoot. Front offices are probably already having serious conversations about the most damaging young players who you could pretend were prospects but would actually only be on the roster to drive the tank.

The Lakers are another such team whose win projection could best be described as a shrug emoji. They’re a .500 team as constructed, but a trade of Russell Westbrook for Buddy Heild and Myles Turner is worth about 4 wins, which is almost exactly their present Vegas total.

This exercise taught me the value of depth. It showed that where there are serious drop offs in rotations, injuries will provide the projections more fragility. The Lakers, Cavs, Raptors, and Pelicans might all have Vegas totals in the 40s, but they get there with drastically different roster composition. Although fit is overblown, I did dock situations I thought would have diminishing returns in Cleveland, Minnesota, and Atlanta. At the same time I'm also ecstatic to see those situations play themselves out, because there's magic behind the chemistry that goes into winning basketball games, and I'm here for it. Let us NBA.

Atlantic		Central		Southeast
Celtics	56.4	Bucks	48.4	Heat	49
76ers	55	Cavaliers	46.6	Hawks	48.4
Raptors	49.9	Bulls	40.4	Hornets	33.3
Nets	48.1	Pacers	25.6	Wizards	33.2
Knicks	41.3	Pistons	25.1	Magic	30.4
Northwest		Pacific		Southwest
Nuggets	50.8	Clippers	50.3	Mavericks	49.1
TWolves	49.8	Warriors	49.3	Pelicans	49
Trail Blazers	38.9	Suns	49	Grizzlies	48.4
Jazz	26.1	Lakers	41	Spurs	23.6
Thunder	19.2	Kings	36	Rockets	18.1

[1] I’m happy betting a lot on ones that I’m confident in, but don’t mind me if I don’t want to bet on team that has a lot of variance coming into the season like the Lakers or Jazz, or one where I’m only a win or two off the market.

[2] Insofar as I have a job

[3] Machine > man, but if machine doesn’t have to go it alone, it’s even more powerful.

[4] This was, of course, the toughest (and stupidest) part of the exercise.

[5] Hoping to do a deeper dive on IQ early in the season.

[6] And also 5 of the last 6 seasons, but I looked at the last 7 full seasons in my dataset and I wasn’t about to cherrypick for clicks.

[7] As they should be, I estimate about ¼ of the league should be tanking, but only ⅙ of the league is. I mean seriously, you really think Charlotte, Portland, and Washington are kidding anyone? It’s embarrassing, they have nothing on the roster that suggests the ability to win a playoff series in the next decade.