Saturday, April 19, 2014

NBA Review 2014

Eastern Conference
Southeast
Miami Heat 
The Heat seemed very disinterested at playing basketball at times and as a result their regular season record suffered because of it.  It appears that Beasley mattered quite a bit more than Oden, at least in the regular season anyways.  -9

Washington Wizards
Martell Webster was not as big of a piece of the puzzle for the Wizards as I thought he would be, but he still provided them with some very good minutes.  +3

Atlanta Hawks
Before the season began I thought that 40-42 wouldn't be quite enough for the Hawks to make the playoffs, instead the Hawks went 38-44 and made the playoffs.  -2

Charlotte Bobcats
Great turnaround year for the Bobcats, although since Bobcats games do not generally happen to be on many TV stations I'm not entirely certain how they did manage to turn it around.  +18

Orlando Magic
On the bright side the Magic are getting quite a few ping pong balls, on the downside they still have a fairly low probability of getting Wiggins.  +1

Central
Indiana Pacers
The Pacers benefited from some close wins and managed to win the fourth most wins in the NBA.. And get a #1 seed.  +8

Chicago Bulls
Absolutely no offense meant to Derrick Rose, but his presence, or lack thereof, is in some ways sort of irrelevant to how well the Bulls actually play.  Rose provides explosiveness, but he tends to back that up with very poor shot selection.  I was a bit disappointed with what Jimmy Butler did this season, but he still provided some very decent advanced stats.  -1

Cleveland Cavaliers
I'm not certain as to if Bynum had discipline issues in Cleveland or what, but he did not provide the Cavaliers with any sort of decent playing time.  -9

Detroit Pistons
As expected the eye test beat the advanced stats in this case.  The Pistons had the second worst percentage for three's on the season.  -3

Milwaukee Bucks
Other than getting a few extra ping pong balls, I do not know what Milwaukee accomplished  this season.  -14

Atlantic
Toronto Raptors
As expected the Raptors did make the playoffs, but not only did they manage to do that, they also captured a top four seed. +7

Brooklyn Nets
The coaching and the new roster proved to be a major obstacle for the Nets to overcome in the first half of the season, but by the beginning of 2014 they gelled fairly well and were one of the best teams in the NBA.  -9

New York Knicks
The Knicks almost made the playoffs by default, but they were just bad enough to even miss them as well.  Barganani's Yay Points!  and the rest of the Knick's crew, such as Carmelo-I can shoot as much as I want-Anthony, underachieved even my low expectations.  -9

Boston Celtics
I am not entirely certain what happened with the Celtics, one moment they were a decent .500ish team and the next moment they were losing games left and right.  -15

Philadelphia 76ers
The Bucks managed to out tank Philadelphia, but at least the 76ers can say that they started the season by scoring 19 unanswered points against the Heat and the 76ers managed to bookend their season with wins over the Heat.  -1

Western Conference
Pacific
Los Angeles Clippers
I do not know if I would say that Bledsoe is overrated any more or not, but the Suns did indeed trade for him.  Chris Paul and company mostly dominated, but they only produced a top five ADJ FG%.  +1

Golden State Warriors
The Warriors overachieved a bit and they had a better team and a better record.  +4

Phoenix Suns
A legitimate apology and congratulations to the Suns for actually being a very decent team.  Other than Goran Dragic single-handedly providing 10+ wins (according to Win Shares) I fail to see how this team improved so dramatically.  If  the Suns would win the potential tie-breakers, then winning 48 games would have gotten the Suns a 3 seed in the East, but in the West it simply meant that they get to watch the playoffs from home.  I was completely off on my prediction for the Suns.  +26

Sacramento Kings
I'm not certain if it is coaching or chemistry, but the Kings should have been a semi-decent team, instead they just put up another .300-.400 winning% type season. -7

Los Angeles Lakers
Once again injuries blew-up the lackers Laker's season.  I'm certain that Kobe's contract has nothing to do with them being a poor team.  -12

Southwest
San Antonio Spurs
A ho-hum season for the Spurs..  What's an odd 31 wins here and there?  I pegged the Spurs a little low before the season began because I wanted to give the division to the Grizzlies, but even if I had not factored that in I still would not have quite pegged the Spurs at 62 wins.  Great job by Coach Popovich once again.  +8

Houston Rockets
There is a fairly wide gap from the Rockets to the team above them, the Clippers, but the Rockets were a very decent team.  I would still argue that the Rockets have one of the, if not the best starting 5 in the NBA.  -2

Memphis Grizzlies
A lack of shooting derailed the Grizzlies' chances at getting good seeding, but their tough defense did still manage to grind them into the playoffs.  -4

Dallas Mavericks
Monta Ellis was almost exactly in line with his normal career numbers, so apparently the Mavs did not find a magic elixir to cure his shooting, but still, somehow the Mavericks managed to win 49 games and reach the playoffs.  Impressive job by Nowitzki and Coach Carlisle.  +11

New Orleans Pelicans
Once again the Cans underachieved.  Davis continued his growth, but there wasn't enough shooting to complement him and propel the Pelicans to a playoff birth.  -7

Northwest
Oklahoma City Thunder
At some point I will likely get around to deconstructing some more pro Westbrook arguments, until then, suffice it to say that the Thunder didn't miss him very much while he was injured.  The combination of Westbrook not taking away quite as many of his shots, since he was injured, and not wanting to be #2 again, helped lead KD to scoring 5 points higher than his career average PPG and also an easy route to the scoring title.  +4

Portland Trail Blazers
I still contend that Lillard is not that great of a player, and Aldridge too while I'm at it, but still, somehow Portland managed to greatly overachieve my expectations.  +20

Minnesota Timberwolves
A winning percentage of approximately .500 of their games was indeed a bad year for the TWolves.  I fail to see why they were such a poor team, apparently coaching or chemistry needs to be improved vastly, because they should have finished with a much better record.  Losing close games does stink, but even if the TWolves had won half of those close games they still would not have played anywhere close to as well as they should have.  Minnesota's point differential pegged them as being the 10th best team in the NBA and even that was not as decent as it should have been.  -7

Denver Nuggets
The Nuggets had some injury issues and that helped contribute to them missing the playoffs for the first time in a decade.  -3

Utah Jazz
I think there is an error with 82games.com in their stat of the percentage of minutes that Jeremy Evans played for the Jazz this season. They peg it at 5%, which seems around 26% too low, but still, even if Evans did play 31% of the Jazz' minutes, then that would be a percentage much too low.  Evans did deal with some injury issues, but the Jazz still have not seemed to realize the potential all-star caliber player he can be if they would just give him starter's minutes.  Because this happens to be the last prediction it is a bit of a disappointing end since it means that, even though I was only a game off for a handful of teams, I was unable to successfully predict any individual team's exact record.  -1

My over/under predictions were fairly fairly horrible.  
I made four predictions for teams to go over: Celtics, Heat, Lakers, Timberwolves.   In terms of being over the line set by Vegas, the first three teams lost and the TWolves pushed.
I made four predictions for teams to go under: Under Bulls, Mavericks, Nuggets, Pistons.  In terms of being under the line set by Vegas, the Bulls, Nuggets, and Pistons won while the Mavericks lost.  
Overall that puts my record for O/U at a poor 3-4-1 for this season.

My overall worst misses for predicting unders were Charlotte, Phoenix, Dallas, and Portland.  
My overall worst misses for predicting overs were Milwaukee, Boston, and the Los Angeles Lakers.

On a proportional level to the number of games I was 9% off.  The summation for the number of games that I missed for each team in the NBA is a total of 226 games.  That in turn means that given a random team my average prediction was 7.53 wins/losses off.  Overall, in terms of accuracy, my predictions were mostly in line with last season.  Last season I missed a total of 212 games, so if in this season I had just done something like swap 7 wins from Minnesota to Portland, then I would have had the same number of misses.  I am still not certain as to how decent my average prediction is in comparison to the average prediction made by others.  Some year I may get around to looking into that.  Thanks for reading.