Hollinger forecast: Raptors 22-60 (could be worst)

[tsherkin]

His point was that you can't sign a free agent with the TPE. The Raps can't offer anything that will sacrifice our cap situation. There are very few exceptions that can be used. I think the whole MLE is gone at this point, and I'm not sure about the LLE. I think all the Raps can offer is the vet minimum. Stop worrying about it.

I caught what he meant. My point was that he isn't going to accept the vet min and we aren't going to pay him, so he's not coming here. He can get more on several other teams, why bother coming up here?

I'd be highly surprised if we win more than 30. A crude +/- and Pyth wins analysis indicates that the Raps would have been 26.539, 21.364, and 31.02 win teams from this most recent season back to 07-08.

So I think this 9 wins figure is likely off by 2-5 wins or so.

Oh, I agree. As I said, it was a purely off-the-cuff measure that didn't factor in what the other players would do in his absence or anything from the new players, just a straight application of win shares as a crude way to look at the team. A quick look at our record without him, as I noted before, suggests a slightly better performance from the team than WS (and much better than Hollinger) predicts.

[Ripp]

The problem with that is that the sample size is quite small. May as well look at the performance over the past 3 years, when CB was off the floor (either due to injury or on the bench.)

Trying to draw conclusions from tiny sample sizes is risky business.

[Alfred]

His point was that you can't sign a free agent with the TPE. The Raps can't offer anything that will sacrifice our cap situation. There are very few exceptions that can be used. I think the whole MLE is gone at this point, and I'm not sure about the LLE. I think all the Raps can offer is the vet minimum. Stop worrying about it.

I caught what he meant. My point was that he isn't going to accept the vet min and we aren't going to pay him, so he's not coming here. He can get more on several other teams, why bother coming up here?

Not to split hairs or anything, but it appeared you thought that Dampier could be acquired using the TPE, which Fairview is correct on -- it cannot be used in that manner.

[I_Like_Dirt]

I think the Raptors will win closer to 30 games than 22, but I'd be happier with 22, to be honest, because I feel the team would be better poised to make the necessary changes, both with a better chance at a top pick, but also in terms of the ability to allow management to come to some much needed conclusions about certain players on the roster that they might not otherwise come to if the team is significantly better than 22 wins.

As far as epically bad, by most standards, yea, 22-wins is putrid. By the Raptors' standards, they've only won 34 games or more in a season in 6 of their 15 seasons in the NBA. Yes, that's right, they've won 33 games or less in 9 of their 15 seasons in the league. The caveat to that is the strike shortenend 98-99 season where they probably would have won 34 games or a few more but instead finished at 23-27, not particularly great, either. If the Raptors win only 25 games this season, it would be only their 5th worst season ever. A 42 win season, on the other hand, would be the teams 5th best season ever. Yuck!

[Ripp]

Oh, I agree. As I said, it was a purely off-the-cuff measure that didn't factor in what the other players would do in his absence or anything from the new players, just a straight application of win shares as a crude way to look at the team. A quick look at our record without him, as I noted before, suggests a slightly better performance from the team than WS (and much better than Hollinger) predicts.

Ah, I misread this. My point is that the 9 wins understates what CB brought to the table...+/- analysis suggest anywhere from 10-14. I'm not sure WS gives the right answers, is my point (though to be honest, I don't completely know how WS is calculated)

[tsherkin]

WS is a fuzzy metric. Like any "all-in-one" sort of thing, it fails to really get the job done in its entirety, but it's a decent starting point. You always have to remember that it's proportionate to total team victories, though, because they are roughly correlated to team wins by b-r.com's measure.

Click here to see how he calculates them.

[Night Rally]

Duke point guards often make poor pros.

It's more that they make poor drivers.

[Ripp]

I see, more BoP stuff. Hard for me to value it deeply unless I see some sort of predictive tests, like DWinsRingsIMO mentioned earlier in this thread. I know that +/- based stuff and Pyth wins does a solid job, but don't know if the same is true for WS.

But to each his own, I guess.

[Hoopstarr]

Blah blah over-analysis blah blah. Considering the improved east, loss of Bosh, same coach, still young core, this is a 12-24 win team. Possibly every bit as bad as the Nets and no better than the Warriors/Sixers/Pistons from last year.

[tsherkin]

DeanO's Four Factors correlate very strongly to wins, and his system is largely based around that, or at least the principles that those numbers espouse. Read the book, it's awesome.

[Lionel Messi]

Oh, I agree. As I said, it was a purely off-the-cuff measure that didn't factor in what the other players would do in his absence or anything from the new players, just a straight application of win shares as a crude way to look at the team. A quick look at our record without him, as I noted before, suggests a slightly better performance from the team than WS (and much better than Hollinger) predicts.

Ah, I misread this. My point is that the 9 wins understates what CB brought to the table...+/- analysis suggest anywhere from 10-14. I'm not sure WS gives the right answers, is my point (though to be honest, I don't completely know how WS is calculated)

Keep in mind that while Bosh left, the supporting cast got better.

Kleiza is an upgrade on Hedouche. Bargnani, Amir, DeRozan, and Weems are likely to get better (in some cases more than others, but you don't expect any of them to regress).

So let's say if Bosh left last year's exact squad, it would fall from a 40 win team to a 22 win team or something, but the improvement in the supporting cast will probably add about 5 wins or so to last year's Bosh-less team. So with those completely arbitrary, "pulled out of my ass" numbers, that's why I'm saying we'll win 25-27 games this season.

[Ripp]

DeanO's Four Factors correlate very strongly to wins, and his system is largely based around that, or at least the principles that those numbers espouse. Read the book, it's awesome.

I have the book, have read chunks of it, think some of the metrics used are suspect. Four factors is solid, but a lot of the other stuff (including individual Drtg, something I've thought about for a while) is not.

[Schad]

Kleiza is an upgrade on Hedouche. Bargnani, Amir, DeRozan, and Weems are likely to get better (in some cases more than others, but you don't expect any of them to regress).

Kleiza might be better, because Hedo was rather bad. However, Kleiza isn't particularly good himself, so I wouldn't expect a considerable impact there.

With the younger guys, it's not a matter of whether their skills will regress, so much as whether they are capable of performing in different, significantly-expanded roles. New Jersey is a great example: there were several talented young players on the roster last year, but without a lead scorer you had guys forced into roles that they simply weren't prepared to fill, and the offense was consequently abysmal.

I don't expect the Raps to be the worst offense in the league -- as the Nets were -- by any stretch, but I also wouldn't be surprised if they tumbled from fifth all the way out of the top half, at which point we're cruising toward a very ugly record.

[tsherkin]

Blah blah over-analysis blah blah. Considering the improved east, loss of Bosh, same coach, still young core, this is a 12-24 win team. Possibly every bit as bad as the Nets and no better than the Warriors/Sixers/Pistons from last year.

Now THAT is a violently pessimistic projection if I've ever seen one. 12 wins, really anything under 20 wins, would make for a pretty exceptional season in the sense that we'd have to be absolutely TERRIBLE to get there. But could it happen? Well...

Look at the 13 teams that have won under 20 games over the last decade, which I was talking about before, and look at their ORTG/DRTG:

09/10 (ORTG, DRTG)

Minnesota 101.7. 111.6
New Jersey 100.6, 110.5

08/09

Washington 105.4, 113.6
Sacramento 105.5, 114.7

07/08

Miami 100.5, 110.0

04/05

Charlotte 101.1, 107.5
Atlanta 100.6, 111.1
New Orleans 99.7, 107.7

02/03

Denver 92.2, 101.3 (my god in heaven, were they bad on O)
Cleveland 96.5, 106.7 (BLECH!!!)

00/01

Washington 100.6, 107.8
Chicago 97.2, 107.3
Golden State 97.8, 107.4

Toronto this past season was 111.3, 113.2, which makes us the third-worst defensive team of the whole group, but our offense was obviously dramatically superior, so we won more games.

This year, we'll decline, but will we decline by 10-ish points per 100 possessions?

It's possible. I guess the big thing to worry about is if we can draw fouls.

Last year, we had 10 guys play 1,000+ minutes. Of them, the only notable guys as far as drawing fouls was concerned were Bosh, Amir, DeMar and Jack.

Bosh, who was by far the best of the bunch, is gone. Amir will not produce the same volume of FTAs as did Bosh, and DeMar's will go down if he's asked to change his role because most of his FTAs came when he was set up to do something the defense couldn't react to and that was almost never him initiating the play.

We take away an efficient PnR and iso scorer and we're going to be relying on non-elite offensive creators, so yeah, our offense is going to decline considerably, regardless of our additions.

Let's be generous and say that we decline 4 points, to around 106.3 ORTG.

Where does that put us? if our defense is the same?

Well, on that list, a differential of -6.9 would put us at the 13th (of 14) differential in that group... which really isn't that bad compared to some of these guys.

Now, things to consider... while we're likely to be about as craptacular on D as we were last year, it'd take a wild swing for us to go from 5th in the league in ORTG to 20th (which is where we'd have ranked last year with a 106.3 ORTG). We ARE going to struggle to draw fouls, in fact I expect us to be just about dead-last in the league in that category. We were 9th in the league in FTA/FGA last year because of Bosh (and I think 5th in FTM/FGA because of our FT%). He goes away, that's going to fall off hard, especially because we haven't added anyone who's known for drawing fouls especially well. Some of the fall will be mitigated by more minutes for Amir. Some, not much. We're likely to be hella below-average in that respect.

We're going to be bad. Not AS bad as the 15-win Chicago Bulls, for example, but it's entirely possible that we're bad enough on offense and wretched enough on defense that we could win 22 games.

12, however, is a wild stretch. We are not going to be bad enough on offense to even approach 12 wins, I don't think.

Look at a team like the 09/10 Nets. They had a differential of some 3 points worse than our projected -6.9. They were at 100.6 / 110.5. Not far off from us defensively and far worse than to where even a massive fall-off for us would bring us down. They were also 21st in OREB%, ass-last in eFG% (which we will not be) and 20th in TOV% (which is unlikely for us as well).

We're going to be worse on offense... but not by THAT much. They were a miserable waste of skin on the offensive end of the floor and it's no small wonder that they lost as many games as they did.

106.3 is also a relatively pessimistic projection for our offense that assumes that absolutely no one steps up at all and that key contributors decline noticeably.

We're more likely to be a 108/111 type team than anything else, which would make an estimate of 28+ wins pretty safe.

We're going to see during the season just how far off our offense falls, but I'd be surprised if we were quite as bad as all that.

[tsherkin]

Not to split hairs or anything, but it appeared you thought that Dampier could be acquired using the TPE, which Fairview is correct on -- it cannot be used in that manner.

I actually did, I thought we could use the TPE to sign him outright, wasn't clear on it, but caught it when someone else said before Fairview that it was not the case. Then I moved on, and F4L treated my follow-up post as me clinging to the notion for whatever reason, hence my "yeah, I caught what he meant" line. *shrugs*

It wasn't a big part of my meaning. I just meant that we can only offer him a small contract and even if we can use the TPE (which, apparently, wecan't), that there's no point in us offering him the money. Thus, no money equals better opportunities for him elsewhere equals us better spent thinking about a Toronto team without Erick Dampier.

I have the book, have read chunks of it, think some of the metrics used are suspect. Four factors is solid, but a lot of the other stuff (including individual Drtg, something I've thought about for a while) is not.

You should read some of the stuff on his old Journal of Basketball Studies website. It gives you a lot of insight into his thought process and why he chose to use certain metrics even though they have known flaws. There's as much craft involved in understanding how and when to apply his stats and metrics as there is in developing them in the first place, and his analysis involves a lot more than just looking at the ratings after they're calculated and drawing everything from that.

I think they're explicitly designed for people with a more technical mind to use, rather than to be treated as out-of-the-box-and-ready statistical representations. He speaks at length about how box score stats are only so valuable and can only give certain amounts of information. Remember, he does his work (and always has) with a focus on providing data for scouts and coaches and the like, people with a certain amount of requisite visual familiarity with the players and strategies of the game. He's just sort of decoding it publicly, after a fashion.

[HomieOmey]

I don't like the Nets comparison because I'm pretty sure the Nets weren't nearly as bad as their record was. Injuries were a huge problem, especially since they were not the deepest team in the league to begin with. Harris and Lopez barely seemed to get the chance to build chemistry together. And as "great" as Harris is, his age and potential were always his biggest positives. Calderon was never really significantly worse, he just never really had the same potential. And Harris clearly didn't show his potential last season. With Jose, Jack, and Barbosa, we should feel a bit more comfortable than they did at the PG position last season (with Harris also battling with injuries last season). We don't have incredible talents, but at least we have decent depth.

[Ripp]

The -3 differential is extremely optimistic, given that we've been -5.87 last year, -7.74, and -3.37 over the past three years, with CB off the floor. It would be phenomenal if we could do that, but seems a bit implausible

[Ripp]

You should read some of the stuff on his old Journal of Basketball Studies website. It gives you a lot of insight into his thought process and why he chose to use certain metrics even though they have known flaws. There's as much craft involved in understanding how and when to apply his stats and metrics as there is in developing them in the first place, and his analysis involves a lot more than just looking at the ratings after they're calculated and drawing everything from that.

I think they're explicitly designed for people with a more technical mind to use, rather than to be treated as out-of-the-box-and-ready statistical representations. He speaks at length about how box score stats are only so valuable and can only give certain amounts of information. Remember, he does his work (and always has) with a focus on providing data for scouts and coaches and the like, people with a certain amount of requisite visual familiarity with the players and strategies of the game. He's just sort of decoding it publicly, after a fashion.

Yeah, I delved pretty deeply into his individual Drtg, for example...read the stuff on his website, did some experiments on my computer with it. The ideas are fine, but fine ideas aren't that interesting unless they have some predictive value (at least, imo.) Anyway, to each his own.

[Hoopstarr]

Blah blah over-analysis blah blah. Considering the improved east, loss of Bosh, same coach, still young core, this is a 12-24 win team. Possibly every bit as bad as the Nets and no better than the Warriors/Sixers/Pistons from last year.

We're going to be bad. Not AS bad as the 15-win Chicago Bulls, for example, but it's entirely possible that we're bad enough on offense and wretched enough on defense that we could win 22 games.

12, however, is a wild stretch. We are not going to be bad enough on offense to even approach 12 wins, I don't think.

Look at a team like the 09/10 Nets. They had a differential of some 3 points worse than our projected -6.9. They were at 100.6 / 110.5. Not far off from us defensively and far worse than to where even a massive fall-off for us would bring us down. They were also 21st in OREB%, ass-last in eFG% (which we will not be) and 20th in TOV% (which is unlikely for us as well).

We're going to be worse on offense... but not by THAT much. They were a miserable waste of skin on the offensive end of the floor and it's no small wonder that they lost as many games as they did.

Great, you made me analyze this more than I wanted to.

The Nets' undoing was their total lack of shooting in general, especially high value shooting. They were last in TS% and had awful outside shooting. We will be close to last with the loss of Bosh and a roster full of low TS% shooters except for Amir. Our rebounding will either stay the same or get worse from the mid-20s of last year. Free throw trips will drop significantly. The defense probably won't be the worst again but it won't be any better than around 108. Offensively, we were at 108.6 last year. A bunch of good team's were around 104-106 last year. No way we're beating that without a single reliable scorer and low FT rates. We'll probably be around 100-102 there. That's a team that can't possibly be any better than the Warriors/Pistons/Wizards/Sixers were last year and possibly as bad as the Nets. Hence, I don't see why anyone would expect more than those teams' 26/27 win totals. I discounted a couple more from that max because of the coaching and general lack of talent, hence 24 as a high and 12 as a low.

[tsherkin]

Sorry, I didn't mean Toronto will be worse than New Jersey. I meant, Toronto will be worse than it was last year, but not as bad as New Jersey was on offense last year.