Jacob Danovitch
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

That’s an interesting way to look at it as well, and could definitely be right. My methodology replicated Tom Tango’s, where I looked at the players outside of an NBA rotation as examples of replacement players and found how many games above/below average they’d be. Average is 41, and I found they’d be 14 games below that; hence, 27.

I certainly see the logic in your case. At that point, I think it comes down to intuition. Considering what would go into a 27 win team versus a 4 win team, I’m not sure. If you think about the guys who won’t get signed this free agency, the guys in the Euro league, G-League, etc; could you form a 27 win team out of that? Maybe, maybe not; I think you could form more than a 4 win team, though. Guys like Aaron Afflalo, Gerald Henderson, etc. are still on the market and almost certainly won’t see rotation minutes. I think a team of those kinds of players would win more than 4 games (how many games did the Knicks win last year? lol).

It also depends on how you define replacement level. I think a collection of the best 10–15th men would win at least 10 games, but if you define replacement level as, say, the best 13th+ men, or the best free agents, then you get closer to your estimate. As for the math behind it, the equation includes my replacement level estimate (which was done on a player level first), but it’d be interesting to simply keep it as wins above average, find the equation, and use the constant as replacement.

For whatever it’s worth, I was looking into some other methods (27 sounded high to me too), and I found 18. My methodology wasn’t super strong on that so I went with Tango’s, but I think the likely true answer is somewhere between our estimates (of course, they’re both on the far ends of the spectrum). 18 smells right to me, but I can’t say that conclusively.

Regardless, thank you for the feedback! I will make a point of it to test this and write it up in my next installment of this when I develop my own model and repeat the points to wins conversion.

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    Jacob Danovitch

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    First year computer science undergraduate at Carleton . Data and software. Annoying teenager with cringy analytics blog. #HireMeSummer2018