metta-tonne wrote:lessthanjake wrote:metta-tonne wrote:Hot take: healthy OKC breaks the regular-season wins record
I’m very high on the Thunder and think they should be regarded as the very clear title favorite, but I’m not sure this is true. Just for reference, they are 21-4 in games with SGA and Chet. Which is not any better than their overall win pace. They’re such a deep team that I don’t think the injuries have had much of an effect on them. One caveat on this is that they are 11-1 in games where all of SGA, Chet, Hartenstein, and Caruso played, but that’s a small sample of games and I think we’re stretching the meaning of “healthy” when we’re requiring that there be no issues at all even with role players (it’s just not a realistic bar, and their opponents certainly haven’t had that).
Weren't the Warriors about that healthy? I think the no center games and different players like Chet coming in and out all cost them a few wins. It is kins of early since maybe they lose the rest of the games but if OKC ends with like 69-70 wins I feel there were def 4-wins hanging around there with all the absences
There might *possibly* be 4 wins hanging around there, but you also have to remember that there might be additional losses out there too. There would’ve been individual games where the guy we’re saying was healthy actually plays badly (i.e. worse than the guy who replaced him in reality in that game). It’s not going to be most games—after all, there’s a reason why a guy like Chet normally starts when he’s healthy. But it would occasionally happen—especially given how deep the Thunder are (i.e. the Thunder players getting more minutes when an injured guy is out are good players too). And there’s a whole lot more wins that could’ve potentially been fumbled than there are losses to turn into wins, so it’s really not clear that the net result would be better.
I’ll give some hypothetical numbers to illustrate this. Chet has missed 48 games. The Thunder have gone 40-8 in those games. Let’s say Chet would’ve played better than the guys getting his minutes 75% of the time. Would we expect that adding Chet would make the Thunder win more games? Well, not necessarily. You see, we don’t care for these purposes if he makes them better in a game they already won. It’s a win regardless! And, for similar reasons, we also don’t care if he makes them worse in a game that they lost. But here’s the thing, if he makes them worse in 25% of those 40 games they won, he’s making them worse in 10 games they won, whereas he’s only making them better in 6 games that they lost. In that hypothetical, does that necessarily mean they’d have a worse record with Chet? No, because maybe the wins where he makes them worse are distributed disproportionately amongst games they won by a lot of points (such that they’d win regardless of Chet making them worse), while the losses where he makes them better were close games that he would’ve been more likely to flip the outcome. It is actually true that many of their losses without him were close, so maybe that’s right. But we don’t really know.
Basically, the bottom line is that, if a team had an incredibly good record in games someone missed and that player’s minutes were replaced in those games by good players that the missing player might actually perform worse than sometimes, it’s actually not clear that that player being healthy would result in a better record, even if we assume that the guy would be a better player than his replacement the vast majority of the time.
