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Why Aren’t the Bulls Building Around Jimmy Butler?

Part 1 of a 2 part look at how the Bulls should build around their star

Jimmy Butler is the franchise.

Almost two years ago, I wrote a piece requesting that the Bulls put the ball in Jimmy Butler’s hands, ala James Harden in Houston. #LetJimmyBeHarden. The context was a specific one: Derrick Rose had just gotten injured (again) and the Bulls needed an option to keep their offense afloat as they prepared for the playoffs. Running things through Joakim Noah had been exposed in the prior year’s playoffs. I thought Butler was probably a better option to run more of the offense, even when Rose returned, because Rose had been pretty poor since his return from his initial knee injuries.

The Bulls didn’t really get the opportunity to make Jimmy the focal point that season, as he got hurt before that article even posted. Last year, the Bulls ran back the same team with Rose as the primary option, Pau Gasol as the secondary option, and Butler in third. Even in that tertiary role, however, Butler was able to emerge as a real star player posting 28.4 points per 100 possessions on a strong 56.2% true shooting. This year with Rose traded and Gasol gone to San Antonio, Butler should have been the obvious choice to be the Bulls’ first option.

Looking at how the best teams are constructed around star players and specifically star players with Butler’s facility for driving to the basket, surrounding Butler with shooters should have been the obvious choice. If you looked at when Butler and the Bulls were most successful last season, it was when he was surrounded by shooters, giving him open lanes to drive to the bucket. When Butler shared the floor with Nikola Mirotic and E’Twuan Moore, two solid spot-up shooters for their positions with average to good defense, the Bulls scored at a 111.1 points per 100 possessions rate (which would have been top 3 in the league last year over the entire season) and surrendered only 104.7 points per 100 possessions (roughly a top 10 defense over the 2015–16 season) for a net rating of 6.4 points per 100 (equivalent to the 57 win Cavs over the full year). That’s really freaking good! Fit matters. Similarly but even better, the Bulls were 111.1 points per 100 and surrendered 103.1 points per 100 in the 329 minutes when Butler, Tony Snell, and Mirotic shared the floor. (All of this information via nbawowy.com).

Eagle-eyed readers will note something interesting about those two 3-man lineups that blitzed the league for Chicago. They included two players, E’Twuan Moore and Tony Snell, that the Bulls willingly parted with in this off-season. They let Moore sign with the Pelicans, when they had the cap space to pay him more than what New Orleans offered. Instead, they used that money to overpay Rajon Rondo for a season, a move that has already blown up in their face. It was always a baffling decision. Rondo can’t space the floor and needs the ball in his hands and out of Butler’s hands to maximize his own value. The fact that the Bulls reportedly had Rondo as their number one free agent target just speaks to how little they seem to understand how to maximize their best player’s impact on the floor.

Miss you, E’Twuan

Then, Chicago traded Tony Snell for Michael Carter-Williams, another floor pincher (the opposite of a spacer) who needs the ball in hands to be relatively successful. Oh, they also brought in more competition for Butler to be “the man” by signing Dwyane Wade to a big contract well past age 30, always a big risk. Wade has been really good for the Bulls, better than could have been expected based on the last couple years, but he’s also a tough fit with Butler. He’s, say it with me now, a poor shooter who needs the ball. The only reason things haven’t been worse is that Wade is a future hall-of-famer who has a super high level of basketball intelligence and works smartly off the ball to find open spaces to cut into around Butler. Why are the Bulls making this so hard on themselves?

Despite all of the roadblocks the Chicago front office has thrown in his way, in some ways literally as they block his path to the basket with non-shooters, Butler has managed to get even better, yet again. He’s scoring over 35 points per 100 possessions on 59.4% true shooting, which is ridiculously good in any environment, but all the more staggering when you consider how often he’s playing against defenses packing the paint.

When Butler has played with space, he’s been even more remarkable. In 187 minutes he’s shared with Mirotic and Doug McDermott, this team’s two best shooters for their positions, Butler is scoring 50.8 points per 100 possessions on 62.8% true shooting, which is obviously freaking nuts. More importantly, the Bulls offense is blitzing the league at 123.2 points scored per 100 possessions, which would be the league’s best offense by a huge margin, while only surrendering 103.7 points per 100, which would be tied with the Warriors for the best defense in the league. (Data again via nbawowy.com). Small sample size caveats aside, pairing this information with the previously cited 3-man lineup data, we can say pretty definitively that Jimmy Butler + shooters is a winning combination.

The Bulls need to be targeting shooters to pair with Butler. They should try to be active during this year’s trade deadline to get shooters to go with Butler, but they also need to be thinking now about who will be available in free agency that they can realistically land that fit with Butler, which is to say shooters who don’t need the ball.

They’d also do well, for the remainder of this season, to start Nikola Mirotic alongside Butler and McDermott to maximize the number of minutes those players share together, given how they’ve lit the league on fire when they play together. I’d also suggest playing Paul Zipser a bit more off the bench, given that he was a 42% three point shooter and an 82% free throw shooter over his 4 year European career. (Data via RealGM). The guy can shoot and, to my eyes, looked to know how to play in the preseason action I caught of him. (His production in very limited minutes hasn’t been there, but the samples are way too small to buy into much there).

Part 2 of this piece, where I lay out a more detailed plan for the Bulls, with options to build this team around Jimmy Butler will be out tomorrow.

The Bulls Seem Broken Right Now, But Are They Really?

The Chicago Bulls started their season off hot, defying the expectations of many, including me. But since starting the season 9–5, the Bulls have won just two games in their last seven, and they have dropped three straight games, including an absolutely embarrassing beat down at the hands of one of the absolute worst teams in the league, the injury-battered, talent-deficient Dallas Mavericks.

What’s wrong with the Bulls?

Chicago can’t shoot. This was a yuuuuge concern going into the season and it’s one that has been borne out about a quarter of the way through the season. Chicago ranks 27th in the league in effective field goal percentage. This is largely driven by the fact that the Bulls are shooting the fewest three point shots in the league and are, at the same time, shooting the worst percentage from three.

It turns out having Rajon Rondo, Dwyane Wade, and Jimmy Butler as your starting guard and wing rotation is not a recipe for effective shooting from deep. Worse still, the Bulls are not getting threes from Doug McDermott, as he’s been injured for 12 games this season, nor from Nikola Mirotic, who is in another one of his many shooting slumps to start the year.

Despite the Bulls’ poor performance in the most important aspect of offensive efficiency (putting the ball through the hoop), they have still managed to fight valiantly at the other aspects of offense to be an above average offensive team. Chicago leads the league in crashing the offensive glass, they get to the line at a very healthy clip, thanks to Butler, Wade, and Mirotic’s penchant for drawing contact, and as a team, they are relatively ball secure.

The Bulls’ problems with shooting are unlikely to go away, given their personnel. Doug McDermott should help some, and there’s some hope that Nikola Mirotic could bounce back from his shooting woes. They are doing about the best they could hope for in the other aspects, roughly speaking, and as a result, they are a pretty good offensive team on the year, despite almost no spacing.

Chicago’s struggles in the last seven games come down to one thing, really. They simply shot the ball from deep even worse than they have done on the year and their opponents have shot very well. During this 2–5 stretch, the Bulls have shot 24% on 129 three point shots, compared with 31.5% on the year, as a team. On the other hand, their opponents’ shot 39.6% on 154 threes, compared with those opponents shooting 35.8% from deep for the season.

That’s the sort of thing that tends to even out over the course of a long season. Chicago isn’t this bad at three point shooting, and their opponents aren’t this good from three. If both the Bulls and their opponents just shot to their season averages from deep, the Bulls would have seen a benefit of 15 net points over those 7 games. That’d be worth another expected win over those 7 games and the Bulls would have simply been 3–4, which is the roughly .500 team that they appeared to be preseason and their 11–10 record now shows.

Chicago similarly benefited to start the season by hitting from three point range at a near league average clip while bombing from behind-the-line with slightly greater frequency than they have in their recent skid. This was largely due to Jimmy Butler and Dwyane Wade making threes well-above what should be reasonably expected.

The Bulls aren’t broken. They just are what most of us expected them to be: a middle of the pack team. They started the season shooting better than you’d expect and lately they’re shooting worse than you’d expect. Over the course of enough games, you see the truth. As long as you don’t let a run of good or bad shooting luck cloud your vision.

Usage Adjusted Rating, Further Explained

Usage Adjusted Rating, as I discussed previously, has Alternate Win Score (AWS) as its base. Alternate Win Score is a simple per minute measure of performance, which has proven to be the best linear weights metric for prediction across high continuity and low continuity contexts. High continuity contexts are situations where a team is the largely the same as it had been when the players compiled the statistics being used to make predictions. Low continuity contexts are the opposite. AWS, as Neil Paine has demonstrated, is the best linear weights metric for prediction when dealing with both of those situations. So how is Alternate Win Score defined?

AWS equals Points+0.7*(Offensive Rebounds)+0.3*(Defensive Rebounds)+Steals+0.5*(Blocks)+0.5*(Assists)-0.7*(FG missed)-(FG made)-0.35*(Free Throws Missed)-0.5*(Free Throws Made)-Turnovers -0.5*(Fouls Committed) all divided by Minutes Played.

I wanted to make some tweaks to this basic formula. Namely, I wanted to include a usage-efficiency tradeoff. As I mentioned in the previous post, APBRmetrics forum poster v-zero provided a way to do that. I incorporated his math into the formula for AWS and after some tweaking, I arrived at UAR.

About that tweaking. Some people have expressed interest in knowing exactly how I arrived at the numbers I came up with. So here goes. I broke AWS into two separate figures. The scoring (and offensive turnover) portion and the Non-Scoring aspect. The Non-Scoring portion of UAR simply is equal to .7*OREB+.3*DREB+Steals+.5*Blocks+.5*Assists-.5*Fouls Committed per pace adjusted 48 minutes.

Then I moved on to the Scoring portion of UAR, which includes turnovers because turnovers use a possession just the same as a shot attempt or free throw attempts, except turnovers obviously always result in 0 points. I calculated the league average for points per possession (PPP), using the simple formula for possessions (FGA+.44*FTA+TOV), and similarly calculated the league average for possessions per 48 minutes (USGper48), again using the simple possession definition. I then used the coefficients v-zero provided to create what I call average ScoreRating, which is simply 5*(PPP)+.076*(USGper48). For this season, thus far, the league average for that number has been roughly 6.2. Next I calculated the Score Rating for every player in the league and subtracted out the league average rate, so that if you’re an average scorer you break-even in Score Rating, if you’re above average you contribute a positive value through your combined scoring volume and efficiency whereas if you’re below average, you detract value from your team through your inability to score. I also had to multiply Score Rating by a coefficient in order to properly value scoring in UAR relative to the NonScoring parts of UAR. The Scoring Rating needed to be worth roughly 2.7 times the Non-Scoring Rating, based on some math resulting from the Four Factor weights discovered by Evan Zamir here. In order to get the scale right, the coefficient turned out to be roughly 2.4. This owed to the league average for Score Rating being 6.2 and the league average for Non-Score Rating being about 5.5. Then I set total league average UAR to 0.

These numbers change year over year but they are pretty consistently in this range. I then added the Scoring and Non-Scoring parts together to get UAR. The equation for this year basically looks like this:

UAR = (2.4*(5*(PPP)+.076(USGper48))+ (7*OREB+.3*DREB+Steals+.5*Blocks+.5*Assists-.5*Fouls Committed per pace adjusted 48 minutes)-((lg avg Score Rating)+(lg avg non-score Rating))

The numbers, as I said, vary year over year depending on what the average numbers league wide are.

Introducing Another Box-Score Based Stat: Usage Adjusted Rating

I recently began tinkering with a new boxscore based catch-all stat after reading a post on the APBR metrics board. The post, by a poster named v-zero, indicated that he had come up with a simple formula for including a usage and efficiency tradeoff in linear weights based metrics. This immediately got me thinking about Alternate Win Score, the best simple box-score based all-in-one stat for predicting future outcomes. The formula for Alternate Win Score, via Neil Paine of Basketball Prospectus is: (pts+0.7*orb+0.3*(reb-orb)+stl+0.5*blk+0.5*ast-0.7 * (fga-fg)-fg-0.35*(fta-ft)-0.5*ft-tov-0.5*pf)/mp. I quickly got excited about the possibilities of including the linear usage and efficiency trade off described by v-zero in that metric to create a better metric for rating players, relatively quickly.

So that’s what I did. Introducing, the rather boringly titled, Usage Adjusted Rating. I pulled the data, updated to include numbers from last night’s game, from the NBA.com/Stats page using the pace adjusted per 48 minutes numbers. I then set a minimum minutes cutoff of 50 (roughly 5 per game in the young season) and ran the numbers. Here they are:

(For your reference, league average UAR translates to roughly 5.5–5.6)

So far about 14–15% of the way through the season, Anthony Davis looks like the most productive player in the entire league on a per minute basis. He’s not even old enough to drink. Goodness. Also, Jordan Hill, look at you! Anyway, this is by no means a perfect metric. It still has all the same problems that plague other box-score based metrics- namely, not properly evaluating defense- but it’s another fun way to look at it. I plan to try to keep the numbers updated as close to daily as I can (they will be located in a new page in the menu of the site) and maybe I will make a weekly feature out of writing about the Usage Adjusted Ratings. Maybe I’ll even come up with a better name for it. Help me out in the comments!

Also, if you like this post and want to be updated when I write something new, follow me on Twitter, @NBACouchside, and like the site on Facebook.

Stats used for this post derived from NBA.com/Stats

Projecting the NBA using xWARP: Phoenix Suns

The Suns project to be our worst team in the Western Conference and after the trade of Marcin Gortat, possibly the worst team in the entire league. In the bid to capture the top odds for the 2014 draft’s first overall selection, the dumping of Marcin Gortat for Emeka Okafor’s contract and an additional 2014 first round pick represents a bit of a coup for the Suns. They were not going to be good this year, no matter what, but Gortat is an above average NBA center who figured to play a starter’s load of minutes for Phoenix. Instead, the Suns have traded him away for a player unlikely to play at all this year due to a scary neck injury and a possible second lottery pick in the best draft in ages. Great work by Phoenix GM Ryan McDonough. So how bad should the Suns be?

The Suns, with their old roster when I first ran these numbers, looked to be a 29 win club, adjusted for league average to a 26 win team. That projection, though, was with Marcin Gortat, Caron Butler, Kendall Marshall, and Malcolm Lee on the team. All of those players have been sent away with nary an NBA player brought in to replace a one of them. That’s roughly 4 to 4.5 wins lost, by our estimation here. So look for the Suns to hover right around 21–22 wins- unless, of course, they go even more totally all-in on the tank and dump Goran Dragic in a deal for further future assets. Such a trade seems at least a 50/50 proposition and probably more likely than that to occur. McDonough has shown no interest in winning too many games this year and damaging his odds at maximum ping-pong balls in May’s draft lottery. It’s a strategy that seems fairly sound given the talent that is available in the top 5 picks of this year’s draft. Of course, there’s no way of knowing whether it will work out, but the logic is sound and the plan has been well executed and that’s really all you can ask for from your team’s executives.

Projecting the NBA using xWARP: Orlando Magic

The Orlando Magic this year have got promise and one of my favorite young players to enter the league in a while in Victor Oladipo. They also have a long way to go to be any sort of winning basketball club. Young players and thus young teams tend to struggle on the defensive end, and teams without an established star player to act as the center of the team’s solar system, allowing the lesser lights to settle into planetary rotation, tend to fall into offensive blackholes. The Magic tick both those boxes, and as a result, they probably won’t win very many games this year.

Relative to their likely low winning percentage, they should still be a fun watch, as Oladipo is the rare perimeter rookie who has the tools, determination, and awareness to make a positive impact on that end, and he has some playmaking ability on the other end. In addition, the continued development of Tobias Harris and Nikola Vucevic piling up double doubles is enough to make things interesting. So what do the numbers from Nathan Walker and my guesses on minutes suggest is a likely win total for this team?

After adjusting the projection for wider league context, the Magic look like a 25 win club. Not great, Bob! But this isn’t a team that’s interested in winning this year. Orlando is, as literally everyone you will read about this team will no doubt inform you, playing the long game. They’re adopting the rebuilding model of the former Sonics, now Thunder, along with fellow expected cellar-dweller, Philadelphia. No shame in that, really. They don’t have the means to go out and get much in the way of established veteran talent and the aforementioned trio of Oladipo, Harris, and Vucevic need developmental minutes. If Oladipo is as good as I think he will be and if the Magic are able to hit on their expected high draft pick in next year’s loaded draft, the future looks much brighter for Orlando than their record this year might otherwise indicate. This is a team that could be a sneaky fun League Pass team, if you’re into watching young players develop and get better, and just want to see Nik Vucevic grab ALL OF THE REBOUNDS.

Projecting the NBA using xWARP: Los Angeles Lakers

I’m not going to tip-toe around this: the Lakers are going to be awful this season. Kobe will not be ready to start the season and may not be the same great player he has been. Even if he is, the rest of the roster the Lakers have assembled following the departure of Dwight Howard is so, so poor. Steve Nash is a husk of the player he was when he won the MVP trophy twice. Pau Gasol is still pretty great, but when you’ve got such luminaries as Wes Johnson, Nick Young, and Chris Kaman expected to play a major part in your team’s hoped for success, well you just shouldn’t expect very much success, even with a fully healthy Kobe Bryant- which the Lakers just are not even likely to have, at least not until at least sometime in December.

The Lakers struggled badly to eke into the playoffs last year with one of the two best centers in the league on their roster. Yes, Dwight Howard was still that impactful, even with the injuries and the frustration and the disjointedness he seemed to suffer from in his lone year in Forum Blue and Gold. The Lakers replaced him with Chris Kaman, who is just not very good. He’s a below average player replacing one of the very best at his position. That’s, obviously, a huge deal. Wesley Johnson and Nick Young are also just not good at NBA level basketball. They have talent, to be sure. Young, in particular, has no problem creating shots for himself, especially off the dribble, which is a useful skill, but he has no interest in playing anything that might vaguely resemble defense and his propensity for difficult, off-the-dribble, contested jump shots- while entertaining- is just not winning basketball. Just how bad can we expect, by the numbers, for the Lakers to be?

After adjusting for the wider league context, the Lakers Net Rating is -5.6, which translates to a roughly 26 win team. That’s pretty awful, but it’s about right for what Lakers fans should expect from this season. If Kobe is able to return early and play more than 2200 minutes this year, they might scrape up to 30–32 wins, but honestly, what would be the point?

The incoming draft class of 2014 is being hailed as the best since the LeBron-lead class of 2003 and if the Lakers aren’t going to make the playoffs- and they aren’t, Laker fans- why should Kobe rush back early or play extended minutes when he does return? Of course, this is Kobe Bean Bryant we’re talking about, so I would not be at all shocked to see him return to the floor and push himself to play 36–38 minutes a night as he tries, in vain, to drag this awful roster in the playoffs. The guy lives for a challenge and will absolutely want to try to prove all the naysayers like yours truly wrong.

It’ll be fascinating and cringe-inducing to watch him try, but I hardly think I’ll be able to look away- and it’s not like I’ll have much choice, as the Lakers are still going to be playing a staggering twenty-nine nationally televised games, despite their frankly pretty awful roster and irrelevance to the NBA’s big picture this season.

Projecting the NBA using xWARP: Utah Jazz

The Utah Jazz won 43 games last year, which — in a stacked Western Conference — got them the privilege of finishing 9th, missing out on the playoffs, and placed them in the no man’s land of the late lottery. This offseason, the Jazz allowed their best player, along with another of their better ones to leave for nothing in return. I’m speaking, of course, about Paul Millsap and Al Jefferson, respectively. Millsap went to Atlanta where he figures to make it back to the playoffs. Jefferson, bizarrely, was able to grab more years and money per year than Millsap, despite Millsap’s overall superiority. Jefferson, though, will have to accept not making the playoffs this year, and the strong possibility that he won’t see the postseason at all in the 3 years he’s now signed to play for Charlotte. The Jazz weren’t interested in committing the sums of money needed to retain either player, especially when the ceiling of that team was the Western Conference playoff bubble.

Utah also, understandably, wanted to use this year as an opportunity to find out exactly what they have in their young big men Derrick Favors and Enes Kanter, whose minutes were limited playing behind Millsap and Jefferson. The Jazz also declined to use their cap space to sign any free agents, instead opting to acquire assets to rent their cap space to the Golden State Warriors. The result is that the Jazz should be a fair bit worse on the court this year but have a clear plan for escaping their current state of non-contention. The plan is clearly to develop their young talent and acquire assets and then use that talent and those assets to form a group worth betting on. In the meantime, though, just how bad should we expect the Jazz to be- by the numbers?

After adjusting for next year’s projected league context, the Jazz’s projected Net Rating is -3.05. Such a projected Net Rating would make them, roughly, a 33 win team. It should come as no surprise, but Derrick Favors, Enes Kanter, and, rising star on the wing Gordon Hayward figure to do most of the heavy lifting for next year’s Jazz. Alec Burks figures to be a slightly below average, but well above replacement option at guard, but it remains to be seen whether Tyrone Corbin plays him the minutes he deserves. I’ve projected Burks to get less minutes than his relative talent on the team would suggest is optimal, but Coach Corbin has generally not played him as much as he deserves, surely much to the consternation of Utah faithful.

I’ve also projected rookie point guard Trey Burke to play quite a few minutes, as I suspect that the use of a lottery pick to draft him and the Jazz’s complete organizational lack of incentive or desire to win games this season make betting on Burke to play a lot of minutes a good idea. Burke figures to be solid for a rookie, with a projected -1.7 xRAPM, he should be solidly above replacement level. As a starting point guard, this year’s iteration of Burke will likely leave something to be desired, but this is a year for learning on the job and I expect Trey will eventually be a pretty good player.

The Jazz will be bad this year, but they should be a fun watch, especially for hoop heads who enjoy watching guys as they progress from prospect to their fully-formed, best selves. The Jazz feature players in various states of development, but most of them are closer to the prospect end of that particular spectrum. That reality will lead to some inevitably ugly basketball, but the talent level that Favors, Kanter, Hayward, Burke, and Burks possess should lead to some genuinely fun basketball at times. For now, those fun moments and the knowledge of the plan in place will have to be enough for Jazz fans.

Projecting the NBA using xWARP: Philadelphia 76ers

Projecting the 2013–14 Sixers is a nightmare. The Philadelphia squad looks, quite clearly, to be tanking the season. Nearly all of the players on their roster are being thrown into roles for which they are terribly ill-suited. Thaddeus Young: Best player on an NBA team? James Anderson: anything more than on an off-the-bench guard? Michael Carter-Williams: starting point-guard in the NBA? These are not questions that any of these players should be asked to answer, but the Sixers aren’t trying to win and here we are.

The trouble is, when projecting future performance in xRAPM, most players tend to occupy similar roles from year to year and thus it’s much more likely that their rating by xRAPM- or any flavor of adjusted-plus minus, for that matter- will look pretty close to the prior year, but when you ask players to do radically more than they have traditionally been asked to do, then their overall impact is very likely to suffer. As a result of this, I would take the win projection that Nathan Walker’s numbers with my minutes estimates produce (shown below) with a giant helping- like a dried up ocean’s worth- of salt. Additionally, the Sixers weird roster construction inevitably throws off what would be more accurate wins projections for the rest of the league. As a result, at the end of all my projections, I will probably write a post with my own subjective- but informed by the stats — guesses as to where teams will come out in terms of records next year. In any event, what do the (probably very wrong) numbers look like?

After adjusting for the wider league context, the Sixers’ projected Net Rating is -3.22, rather than the -2.11 shown above. A -3.22 Net Rating results in a projected 32 win team. Frankly, I would be shocked if the Sixers were able to win even half that many games. It seems that Vegas agrees with my subjective assessment, as the Over/Under for this year’s Philly squad is set at 16.5 wins.

The reason the Sixers rate out so well in this analysis is that they have a team full of guys that in their prior, less demanding roles were fully capable of being replacement level or above. These Sixers have very few players who would have projected as sub-replacement level, had they stayed in their prior roles, and their rookies, Michael Carter-Williams and Nerlens Noel- both of whom will likely be expected to play heavy minutes — actually project to be near average level players. Oh, and Thad Young, as it turns out, is pretty darn good, though certainly not someone you’d want as your best player. It’s worth watching whether xRAPM’s relative love for this Sixers team is as off as Vegas, the rest of the basketball-watching world, and I, subjectively, think it is. I’ll also be watching to see if the Sixers trade Thaddeus Young, in order to go with the full-on, totally unabashed tank.

Projecting the NBA using xWARP: Portland Trailblazers

The Portland Trailblazers got better this summer. They added a solid defensive center to pair with LaMarcus Aldridge, in Robin Lopez. They snagged a talented, if unproductive, young big man to back up Aldridge, in Thomas Robinson and they grabbed solid swingman Dorell Wright. Finally, they drafted C.J. McCollum and signed Mo Williams- because they want to have ALL of the small combo guardy point guards. Basically, the Blazers improved their bench, which was terrible, to the point where it is downright serviceable now. How good should we expect the Blazers to be next year, then, based on the Walker numbers and my minutes estimates?

Portland’s projected Net Rating, adjusted for context, is -1.39, which would make them a 37 win team. This projection would place them at 11th in the Western Conference, though the difference between Portland’s projected 37 wins and the 42 projected wins of the 7th and 8th rated teams is marginal, so Portland’s improved bench has put them firmly on the Western conference’s playoff bubble. It will be interesting to see whether they can make it in to the postseason, and whether merely qualifying for late April play will be enough to satisfy LaMarcus Aldridge’s allegedly professed desire to play for a better team.

Speaking of Aldridge, he projects, unsurprisingly, to be the Blazers’ best player, by far. Dame Lillard should continue to be quite solid as a second year player. C.J. McCollum, Mo Williams, and Thomas Robinson — mentioned earlier — all project to be replacement level or worse, although they will still be an improvement over last year’s downright terrible bench crew. Robin Lopez should be very helpful. I’ve projected him for only 1900 minutes, but really, the Blazers ought to play him more. He’s much better than any other option they have at center. It’s a possibility that playing a 7 footer too many minutes could be dangerous for health reasons- just ask Joakim Noah’s busted up feet — but Lopez played over 2100 minutes last year with no problems. He could certainly stand to play a few more minutes per game over the 26 minutes a night he played last season. I’d recommend that he play 30 minutes a night. It might only change their projection by one win over the course of the 82 game season, but given that these Blazers are right on the bubble of the playoffs, one extra win could be hugely important.

The Blazers also have to hope that the talent that made Thomas Robinson a top 5 draft pick shows out next year and his projected xRAPM of -2.3 is an underestimate of what he’ll produce for Portland next year. Portland’s probably not the best bet to make the playoffs next year, but there’s reason for hope and maybe that’s enough. What do you think, Blazers fans?

Image via Wikimedia Commons.