Nylon Calculus: A Thanksgiving meal to represent every NBA team

To get everybody into the holiday spirit, I made a Thanksgiving Day meal to represent every NBA team. To sort the “turkeys” from the “casseroles,” I ranked all the players in the league by the number of Wins Above Replacement (or VORP multiplied by a factor of 2.7) that each one added to his team(s) during the past two-plus regular seasons.

The classic Thanksgiving starting lineup features turkey, mashed potatoes and stuffing, so we’ll start by doling out these labels to the best players in the league. Brussels sprouts get a bad rap, but they are actually pretty delicious when they’re soaked in olive oil, so I’ll be including them as a “favorable Thanksgiving dish” here, too.

Full disclosure: I don’t really know if Cornish game hens are tiny replicas of their larger turkey cousins, but that’s my working assumption.

Not every player in the league can be a star — everyone has their own role to play. Among the “roll players,” cornbread is a level above any other bread option. The rest is just gravy.

These last designations might take a little more explanation because they’re really a reflection of my own Thanksgiving tastes more than anything else. But, come on, green-bean casserole is nasty, I think we can all agree on that point. The sweet-potato casserole — and specifically those tiny marshmallows on top of the sticky orange concoction — will act as my stand-in for all of the NBA’s empty-calorie scorers who look so impressive at first glance but prove to be insubstantial after closer inspection.

Read More: How to talk to your family about the NBA on Thanksgiving

There have been some really outstanding rookies early on this season, but for now, we can only consider them collectively as tantalizing unknowns. They are that experimental dish you’re debuting at Thanksgiving for the first time this year, the bacon-wrapped dates that were inspired by watching too much Top Chef. They might turn out to be delightful but they also harbor the potential for utter disaster, who knows?

In my household, the cranberry sauce was strictly obligatory. It was squeezed out of its aluminum can before the meal, it sat untouched throughout the evening and it’s perfect-can shape went wobbling into the trash when all the dishes were cleared. Cranberry sauce was basically the 15th man of our Thanksgiving tradition.

With these definitions for each turkey-day dish, we can start to break down the 30 rosters by division and see how each team’s meal stacks up, starting in the Southwest Division.

The Rockets have an impressively balanced spread centered around James Harden’s turkey waddle. The Spurs will be similarly provisioned when their main dish, Kawhi Leonard, makes his return (injuries indicated with lighter font for Leonard and others). In contrast, the Mavericks have no turkey and no main sides, either, and they will be forced to subsist on bread and water for the foreseeable future.

In the Northwest, you can see how Minnesota and Denver will be nicely set up once their little hens turn into full-grown turkeys. On the other hand, you’re left wondering if Portland and Utah have enough goodies to balance out a surplus of green beans. Oklahoma City’s meal looks good on paper tablecloths, but the recipe still needs more work.

Likewise, the Cavaliers have all the components for a fantastic meal — but should we be checking for the expiration date on this stuff? And, good God, look at that mountain of green-bean casserole sitting in Chicago. All the Cristiano Felicio gravy in the world won’t make that palatable.

This is probably a good place to point out that by using two-year Wins Above Replacement stats, I’ve adopted a descriptive rather than a predictive approach to categorizing the players into dishes. That is, I’m sure developing studs like Kristaps Porzingis (shown here as cornbread) and Joel Embiid (shown as a dinner roll) will be turkeys or mashed potatoes some day soon; but youth and injuries have limited their output to date.

No turkeys in the Southeast, yet.

And, finally, here’s the perfect Thanksgiving Day meal. The Warriors have not one but two main courses (Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant) with all of the obligatory fixings in the form of mashed potatoes (Klay Thompson), stuffing (Draymond Green) and brussel sprouts (Andre Iguodala) plus two helpings of cornbread (David West and Zaza Pachulia) and plenty of rolls (Shaun Livingston, Kevon Looney, Omri Casspi, and Patrick McCaw).

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There are also single servings of sweet potato (Nick Young) and green bean (Quinn Cook) casseroles as well as an app-sized dish of dates (Jordan Bell) just to be thorough. And there’s gravy to smother it all (JaVale McGee).