A couple of months back, I came across a great post over at Hoopinion, TrueHoop’s Atlanta Hawks blog, where they took a look at Win Shares and used them to try and predict the number of wins that they will have next year. I have been wanting to do this for a little while now, but I also wanted to finish up my schedule breakdown before doing this, just to have two different views to look at it, objective and statistical. Now that I finally finished my schedule breakdown, we can go on with this. A quick note, all statistics used from now on come from Basketball-Reference.
So what we are going to do is look at career win shares per 1000 minutes played and then the same number from 08-09, and using those numbers we can come up with an estimate of their number for next year. So here are the first three numbers mentioned:
We can take these rates, give out minutes, and then come up with a pretty good estimate of how many wins that they are worth for this year. You total all that up, and you got an estimation for wins this upcoming year. (Total Minutes = 19680 = 48 x 5 x 82)
A few things real quick. For Terrence Williams, I used the estimate for Courtney Lee, because I think they could end up having similar rookie seasons. The thing for him is just to find enough minutes. So in the end, these numbers got us taking 38 games this upcoming year. The thing to note though is that this doesn’t really take into consideration your opponents (I honestly don’t know if that factors into this at all). I have them winning 30, looking at it game by game, so we will see at the end of the year which is more accurate. What do you guys think?
