Saturday, October 30, 2010

How many for wins the Heat?

It's been covered, a lot. Everybody up through John Hollinger has projected the number of wins for the Miami Heat this season, and I have no secret methods, but I'm interested and there need to be some basketball articles for the NBA season. I looked at it two different ways. First, I added up last season's Win Shares of all the Heat players. Lebron had 18.5, Dwayne Wade had 13, and Chris Bosh had 9. Impressively, Udonis Haslem had 6 win shares last year (he's a solid defender), but that's where the help stops. For the season the Heat project to have a total of 67.1 win shares.
Some other historic teams:
08-09 Lakers: 60.8 win shares, 65 wins.
08-09 Cavaliers: 68.0 win shares, 66 wins.
07-08 Celtics: 70.2 win shares, 66 wins.
99-00 Lakers: 63.3 win shares, 67 wins.
96-97 Bulls: 71.3 win shares, 69 wins.
95-96 Bulls: 75.3 win shares, 72 wins.
It appears that win shares do a good job of predicting wi- Wait, THIS WON'T BE LEBRON'S BEST TEAM?!?! That's right, the 08-09 Cavaliers had 68 win shares, .9 more than this year's Heat project to have. The weak bench behind the Three Amigos will cost them this year.
The other way to analyze the Heat's upcoming performance is to look at their projected points. Last season they averaged 96.5 ppg, and gave up 94.2. Using Bill James's pythagorean method (winning percentage = ppg^14/(oppg^14 + ppg^14)), and updating projected ppg totals, it's possible to project win total. Adding Lebron and Bosh is a huge advantage here, bringing in 916 and 513 points each according to John Hollinger. The pythagorean method projects the Heat at 71.97 wins. One key difference between the two is Chris Bosh. He ranks the 8th best NBA player in Hollingers Value Added, but only the 19th best by win shares. Either way, high 60s is a good win projection for the Miami Heat this season. I like win shares better so I'll say the Miami Heat get 67 wins this season.
I'd also appreciate possible nicknames for this year's Heat. Andy, this is your time to shine.
Posted by Austin Link at 1:07 AM
Labels: , ,

2 comments:

  1. AnonymousNovember 2, 2010 at 12:58 PM

    Immediately after finishing my rap I set to work on your nickname project. I decided that instead of giving you one or two good names (lame) I would give you a whole bunch of crappy names. Here you go:

    1.The Fan FLAvorites
    2.Fire and Rimstone
    3.The Axis of B-ball
    4.The Rebel Alliance,now featuring Lebron Solo and Princess Layup(Bosh I guess?)
    5. The fire and the James (dragonforce reference!)
    6.Heat Visionaries
    7.The Three Miamigos (Probably the most legitimate contenders)

    If you think these are bad be glad I didn't include my Harry Potter one (Hint: it involved LebRon Weasley)

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousNovember 2, 2010 at 5:24 PM

    umm, as good as suggestion 7 is, it is not multiple suggestions, therefore it should read the most legitimate contender, not "contenders"

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)