How Good Are Post-Josh-Smith Detroit Pistons?

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Jan 6, 2015; San Antonio, TX, USA; Detroit Detroit Pistons point guard Brandon Jennings (7) celebrates his game-winning shot with teammates against the San Antonio Spurs at AT&T Center. The Pistons won 105-104. Mandatory Credit: Soobum Im-USA TODAY Sports

A fair question. Answer:
Very good.

They’re 6 of 6.
Average offensive rating of 114 (would be 3rd in the league).
Average defensive rating of 97.7 (would be 1st in the league).
Net rating of 16.3.

Adjusted for opponent quality and home-court advantage is slightly less, but still monstrous: 15.3.
This is 50% better than the best team in the league (by adjusted rating) — the Warriors’ current 10.21.
If this net rating keeps up, it would mean the current Pistons are the equivalent of a 73-win team.

Here is a graph of their season game-NetRating, adjusted for competition and HCA:

This is crazy. And obviously to some degree the Pistons will slow down. But by how much? One way to look this is by measuring all of the Pistons’ performance without Josh Smith on the whole season (including when he was off the court in earlier games). Luckily, Basketball-Reference’s on-off stats tell us that in ALL their possessions without Smith (including these 6), they are outscoring opponents by roughly 7.1 points per 100, or the equivalent of a 59-win team.

Let’s look at these stats in context of a couple others to round out this picture:

By including their preseason projection (based on much more data) and their whole season (again, far more data), we can at least have a number to throw in to regress the figures by. To be extremely conservative (which mathematically is usually the right answer), I just averaged all four of these numbers to get the following:

Avg of expected number of wins: 40
Expected odds of making the playoffs*: 84%

I would personally give them a few more wins because the East is extremely easy and obviously something has drastically changed, but for now I’ll stick with 40 since it’s such a hill to climb.

All stats from basketball-reference.com.
*Playoff probability interpolated from here.