2015-2016 Power Rankings: Ranking the Year

Nylon Calculus, as a site for analytics and a haven to the most numbers-obsessed of us, is, naturally, particularly fond of using analytics to predict the outcome of every season: prediction is what we do. Right now, at least three different sets of predictions are very easily found on the site, and even more of the staff have done predictions they haven’t published.

As we’ve finally hit opening day, it seemed like the right time to publish the first of the power rankings for the year. After quite some deliberation about what these first power rankings should look like – the usual plan doesn’t really work before there are any games – it occurred to me: with all the various different types of projections floating about the site…who’s to say which one is better? Which to listen to? What do they all mean?

Well, we still can’t say, yet, but we can at least average out all of the projections into a single Nylon Aggregate Projection (NAP?).  Ideally, these might even beat the rankings individually.

For the first week of Power Rankings, then, we’re averaging out the projected wins of all of the accessible projections from Nylon Staff – both posted projections and unposted – into one, single average set of projections, and ranking all the teams in the league by the number of wins we, on average, expect them to get.

The Wins, are, of course, the number of wins we most expect each team to get. “Difference from Vegas” is the difference in the projections from Vegas’ expectations, based off of the season over-unders at The Greek’s sportsbook (negative means we expect the team to do worse than Vegas, positive means we expect them to do better). The standard deviation is the variance between our projections: a low standard deviation means our staff was all in pretty uniform agreement about how the teams would shake out, where a high standard deviation indicates that there was quite a bit of disagreement.

The Nylon rankings are as follows.

The Top 10

1. Golden State Warriors: The reigning champs come out overwhelmingly on top, here, with not only the highest ranking, but the highest ranking by a whopping 6 wins. This might seem boring – and maybe it is – but it still feels like, even after winning a damn championship, people haven’t quite appreciated how much better the Warriors were last year than the rest of the league. The standard deviation for the Warriors is fairly high, but even the lowest ranking for them, Dallas’ Kevin Ferrigan’s ranking, was 2 higher than the Cavaliers’, here, and the highest projection was 69 wins, coming from Nick’s PT-PM. Safe to say that, until proven otherwise, the Dubs are still the team to beat.
   
2. Cleveland Cavaliers: It’s hard not to imagine the Cavaliers getting better this season relative to last, between more time for the team to gel, the improvement of Kevin Love and other team youngsters, and a newly motivated LeBron James. So, the fact that the projections have the Cavs at 57 wins, 4 more than last year’s 53, probably shouldn’t be a surprise, though with Kyrie Irving out for the foreseeable future, it should, maybe, raise a few eyebrows. Nonetheless, in the tepid East and with the King onboard, it’s easy to see the Cavs coasting until they’re all healthy and raring to go.
3. San Antonio Spurs: The Spurs were probably the biggest “winners” of the offseason. They were many people’s favorites to win the championship last season, and since then they’ve added an All-NBA player and David West. They did so at the expense of Tiago Splitter, though, and a few nagging concerns about defense have them projecting just a notch below last season’s Finals titans. Nonetheless, as always, beware the perennial Spurs. Don’t overthink them: they’re going to be ludicrously good.
4. Oklahoma City Thunder: The Thunder came out as the projected “best” of the top of the West morass. The difference between the Thunder and the rest of the high West, especially when the standard deviation in the projections is taken into account, is pretty insubstantial, and can come down to a billion small unpredictable moments over the course of the season. The Thunder project to be excellent, though, of course, because they have two of probably the top 5 players in the league, and another who might be top 20. They also have many questions: a new coach, they just paid Enes Kanter a ton of money, and…Dion Waiters.
5. Houston Rockets: The Rockets have been touted by many statheads – including our dear leader Seth Partnow – as the most likely dark horse championship contender, and the arguments are myriad and all very legitimate. There aren’t a lot of huge reasons that the Rockets couldn’t win it all…expect they have to beat the Spurs, Warriors, Thunder, and/or Cavaliers. It might be their year, but it’ll be challenge, to be sure.
6. Los Angeles Clippers: The Clippers are the team at the top of the West that I’m most concerned about. While I understand the enthusiasm, I’m not sure how much of the new positives are really positive: Lance Stephenson was the most damaging player in the league last year when you account for how many minutes he played, Josh Smith has been good for one and a half months total over the last four years and now he’s playing under a coach not likely to discourage bad behavior, and who even knows what Paul Pierce is bringing at this point. The Clippers get the benefit of another year of growth for Blake and DeAndre and maybe that offsets everything else, but consider me skeptical.
7. Toronto Raptors: The Raptors appearing as the second best of the East may be one of the biggest surprises here, and the projections are pretty substantially higher than Vegas’ projections, but the variance in the results among the Nylon staff is rather small; their worst projection had the Raps at 47 wins, the highest had them at a whopping 52. The gist is ultimately rather simple: Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan are still very good, they added a great player in DeMarre Carroll, and Jonas has another year to develop. The North should be good this year.
8. Memphis Grizzlies: The Grizzlies are the perennial “good but not good enough” team, and that seems as true for this next season as it has ever been. They’ll still have that exceptional core – Conley, Gasol, and Randolph – and they’ve added quite a few good pieces: Matt Barnes was a nice get, and I’ve always been a huge, huge fan of Brandan Wright, who may be on one of the best deals in the league. They’ll be a bear to beat, no pun intended, but it’s still just really hard to imagine this team as a title contender.
9. Boston Celtics: The Celtics were the analytics-projection-shock team of the offseason. Data models love them, everyone else is, perhaps reasonably, skeptical. They explanation is straightforward: they’ve got a lot of pretty good young players on the right side of the aging curve, in fact, they’re all hitting the place where they start showing the good stuff, and they’ve added a few pretty good players. Data suggests that all that “very good” adds up into an excellent team, while most people are more skeptical that that’s true. If you’re a betting man, this is a good opportunity to bet the over on Vegas’ line.
10. Chicago Bulls: The Bulls will, as with the last many years, be very good. Jimmy Butler is very good. Many other players are good – Pau, Noah, Taj, Rose – and they got a lot of great young guys in Bobby Portis and Nikola Mirotic. The Nylon staff is far more bearish on the Bulls than Vegas, but the Bulls will be good. Again.

Other Teams of Interest

• Atlanta Hawks: The Hawks dropping out of the top 10 in the league is the most surprising thing here I think personally, but the loss of DeMarre Carroll, the addition of the not-very-good Tim Hardaway Jr, and general guard malaise drops them a few wins from last season. There wasn’t a lot of variance in their wins, either (the highest total they recorded among the staff was 48 wins) so we’re just left to see if the whole is greater than the sum of its parts again.
• New Orleans Pelicans: Anthony Davis has a real, serious chance to win MVP this season, and there’s a legit argument among Pels fans that this is a much better team in disguise, hidden by injury woes last year. Unfortunately, those woes don’t seem to be dissipating already in this early season, but at least the Pels can be looking forward to an above .500 team this year.
• Washington Wizards: The Wizards weren’t very good last year, really, but they finished with more wins then than they’re projected to this season. Washington started better last season than they finished, their remarkable playoff run excepted, and they lost at least one important piece in Paul Pierce, and a lot of their key cogs are on the distinctly wrong side of the age curve. They’ll be fine..for the East.
• Utah Jazz: The Jazz are the popular pick to get the 8th seed in the West next year behind a rambunctious run at the end of the season last year, and those are the results that the staff had as well. The Jazz’s defense should be overwhelming behind the continued rule of the Stifle Tower, Rudy Gobert. If only the Jazz could fix that backcourt.
• Dallas Mavericks: The Mavericks are perhaps the most controversial team to project for…when you’re not using the hard data. Subjective power rankings have them everywhere from 45 wins to last in the league, but the Nylon Staff was in almost unquestioned agreement that the Mavs are shooting right at something like 4o wins. The Mavs had a series of woeful free agent missteps lately, but at least they made two very, very good signings in picking up Nylon Calculus’ Kevin Ferrigan and Krishna Narsu[1. Ed: I promise this is the last time we mention this, because they’re both dead to me now…]. Watch for them in the next few years.
• Milwaukee Bucks: The Bucks are a fun bandwagon team, and I’m super excited to watch them, but this is the first hammer the under team on our projections. They’ll likely be fun, but they’re still young, Giannis is cool to watch but he’s not yet a game changer, we don’t know what Jabari really looks like yet, Michael Carter-Williams has been mediocre-to-bad so far in his career, and there’s *no* spacing outside of Khris Middleton. Cool, fun, team, but those things don’t need to be the same thing as good right now.
• Portland Trailblazers: The Blazers will be bad. They lost LaMarcus Aldridge, who is very very good, for nothing. They traded Batum, who is also good, for some players who are slightly less good and they’re sort of hoping Al-Farouq Aminu covers the gap (he won’t). They lost Robin Lopez. The reaction of pure confusion at their 38 win projection is understandable. But look: the players they’ve added are all good, they should have at least a good defense, and Damian Lillard is still really, really good. At the very least, this is a team that can win against the East and eke out quite a few surprise wins against the West while they’re at it.
• Miami Heat: TNC staff is skeptical of Miami, as well. Most of their players are old or hurt, and most of their stars are guys who a lot of data suggests haven’t been good in quite a while. Goran Dragic and Chris Bosh does not a contender in the East make.
• Charlotte Hornets: The Hornets were the team that most stumped the Nylon staff. Some members had them as low as 26 wins, others had them as high as 45. A lot of that is the MKG injury, but that’s not a 20 win difference, whether or not he’s DPOY worthy. The Hornets’ blazing preseason start certainly caught a few eyes, and they’ll be a particularly interesting one to watch when the season starts.
• Sacramento Kings: The Kings *should* be bad. Drafting Trill Stein is great, as was the Koufos signing, Ben McLemore should develop more, and Seth Curry might be interesting, but Marco Belinelli hasn’t been good for anyone in a long time (even the Spurs!), they brought in Rajon Rondo – who is just bad now – to take away minutes from Darren Collison again – who is less bad – and they added Caron Butler, too, who is also several years removed from being a positive contributor. That’s a lot of bad new additions, and the team was already very bad last season. Still, we’re sort of at a point where DeMarcus Cousins, some good young talent, and George Karl are enough to earn over 35 wins.
• Every Single Team from rank 25 and down except probably the Nets: The teams all will have a little more time to develop young talent, and they’ll get more picks, but they’re also still pretty…really bad. At least they might not be bad…sometime…soonish!