Nylon Calculus: A Thanksgiving meal for every NBA team

It’s the fourth Thursday of November and you know what that means…it’s time for a very special tradition…you know, the one with all the turkey and stuffing…that’s right, it’s time for me to draw a Thanksgiving meal to represent every NBA team by designating players as classic holiday dishes based on some convoluted mish-mash of their impact, status, age, experience, role, and scoring! I tried something similar last season, but hopefully, you did not read it; because I’m planning on re-using most of the puns, anecdotes, and jokes, here.

This time around, I’ll be separating the ‘Big Turkeys’ from the ‘Slimy Casseroles’ using Jacob Goldstein’s multi-year Player-Impact Plus-Minus stat, an estimate of a player’s net impact on his team during the past three seasons.

Let’s start the labeling process with Thanksgiving’s heavy hitters, the triumvirate of gobble-day dishes: turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. These staples are the All-Stars of any holiday meal, so it’s only fitting that their namesakes should be the All-Stars of the NBA.

Brussel sprouts don’t get much respect. I guess because of the farts. But I think they actually taste pretty good, especially if you roast them in olive oil, salt, and pepper until they’re all crispy. In other words, I think they’re beneficial to the meal. Otto Porter Jr. is the Brussel sprouts of the NBA — he makes a big positive impact without much fanfare. See what I did there? That’s a metaphor.

Now, here comes some wordplay. This next group of players is comprised of ROLE players. We’ll refer to them as the ROLLS of the meal because those two words are homophones. But, also, because bread is a complimentary dish in the Thanksgiving meal and these players have a complementary impact on their teams — not overwhelmingly helpful, but not harmful either.

We all have different tastes, of course. Maybe you like sweet potato casserole. I don’t. I mean, I always think I’ll like it. It smells good and it looks pretty with all that burnt marshmallow on the top, but it’s usually a let down for me. There are some NBA players like that. They look impressive at first glance, they score a lot, etc.; but they actually have a negative impact.

Green-bean casseroles are more unambiguously bad.

Rookies are unpredictable. They are that avant-garde dish you’re trying out at Thanksgiving for the first time this year, the bacon-wrapped dates you found on Pinterest. They might turn out great but they might be a disaster too, who knows?

Cranberry sauce is another divisive dish. I’m sure it can be delicious when prepared properly; but, in my house growing up, it was strictly perfunctory. Coaxed out of its aluminum-can form before the meal, it sat untouched and perfectly cylindrical throughout the evening until it slid glistening and wobbling into the trash with the rest of the scraps. Cranberry sauce was the 15th man of my family’s Thanksgiving lineup.

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OK, so now we know what all the dishes are meant to signify and you can go ahead and use this Tableau dashboard to sift through the data. Find the meal to match your favorite team. Filter by a player’s age, experience, status (All-Star or not), and box-score stats (points and minutes per game) – to see how the dishes are related to these things. Or pick your favorite dish and see who is included.

And if you’re reading this on a mobile device, follow this link to find a version of this dashboard that is optimized for smaller screens.