2026 Win Projections

Last year my win delta was 7.7 and Vegas’ was 8.4, which sounds impressive and seems like a pretty big win for the best publicly available wins™… except that I was off by 10+ wins on 9 teams.

So yea, it was a wild year, with lots of teams trying to capture the Flagg.

	Aaron	Vegas [1]
2024-25	7.7	8.4
2023-24	7.1	6.4
2022-23	5.9	6.3

This year is a disaster, and though I’ll still technically call these the best publicly available win projections™, I'd rather not bet on it. The structure of so many of these rosters is so haphazard that I’m less confident than I’ve been in years past. The Pacers, Celtics, and Hornets have decent rosters, but they've decided to employ exclusively third string centers. Might it work? Sure! There’s no evidence any of them are bad, but there’s just so little sample size of any of them playing against good players that I have no idea. When making full season minute projections, how do I even account for lots of talent on the perimeter and not so much talent on the interior? Should I just assume Derrick White will play some center? Will those lineups be able to make up for 50% defensive rebounding by scoring a zillion points on offense? Who knows!

I suppose there are at least a few things I have some confidence in.

The Pelicans are bad. The front office is bad. They don't have their pick. Their bench is especially bad. I don't expect the reality of any of this to change just because Zion is on Ozempic.

The Bucks are mediocre. Yes I know they have a top 5 player, but the third best player on the Bucks in my projections is Ryan Rollins. And yes I have heard of him, and I do think he’s a little underrated, but he’s the third best player on a .500 NBA team?! It’s a bad roster, and whatever spacing they gain on O, I’m pretty sure that Giannis and Myles Turner no longer have the defensive chops to make up for on D. This is an under .500 team.

The Timberwolves, Nuggets, Rockets, and Clippers are all good, but high Vegas projections and various questions about guys being too young, positional balance, or guys being too old have me a little lower than market (the West is awesome, but I never mind taking an under on a 50+ win total, as the base rate is chaos).

I'm not a pessimist! There are some teams I'm high on!

The Warriors are good. Admittedly, they're relying on their geriatric players more than I’d like to admit, and most likely one of those four will wind up falling off a cliff... but in the meantime they should have enough young guys to stem the tide. As long as Steph and Jimmy are still All-NBA level players (asking a lot, but they’re HOFers with skillsets that should age, and they take care of their bodies) that can play 60+ games, this is a 50 win team. 

This was going to be an entire paragraph about how the Grizzlies are mediocre, but they're impressively mediocre, making their mediocrity a bit of a super power! But that paragraph has been nuked by the news that Scotty Pippen Jr. (actually pretty good) will miss 3 months and Ty Jerome has a calf injury that'll cause him to miss a month (also pretty good). The good news is Ja Morant will play in the season opener (pretty good, but not as good as you think he is!), but that depth is looking much shakier now when you consider all the front court injuries to start the season. Could be a bit of a gap year in Memphis. Luckily they've fattened up the coffers a bit with the Bane trade, which was great value, even if you love the player.

With less tankers than in previous years and a compelling upcoming draft class, more teams should be considering a gap year if they aren’t already [2]. The Blazers and Pelicans have extremely difficult schedules in 2025 and are teams that might be candidates to use those slow starts to trade some guys– though the Pelicans, in management malpractice, famously don’t control their own pick! And when I sort schedule by month, the Kings play 16 games against teams projected to win an average of 46 games in November. Might something like a 6-15 start cause them to get religion? [3]

Anecdotally, the number of offseason surgeries and preseason injuries seems high. There are very few tanking teams, creating a vacuum that might suck a few organizations into a gap year. Game to game variance is at an all time high with 3 point shooting and pace trending upward. And a bunch of teams have rosters that don’t make sense [4].

The upshot is that this uncertainty has me unusually excited to see the product on the floor for a number of teams (Spurs, Raptors, Blazers, Magic, Hawks, Hornets?!), which means I’m very ready to NBA.

Atlantic		Central		Southeast
Knicks	50.9	Cavaliers	54.2	Magic	51.3
Celtics	45.3	Pistons	44.5	Hawks	47.9
76ers	39.5	Bucks	38.6	Heat	36.3
Raptors	37.4	Bulls	36.5	Hornets	30.1
Nets	23.2	Pacers	35.4	Wizards	22.7
Northwest		Pacific		Southwest
Thunder	64.4	Warriors	52.4	Rockets	48
Nuggets	50.2	Lakers	45.3	Spurs	46.4
Twolves	45	Clippers	44.4	Mavericks	45.2
Trailblazers	30.5	Suns	34.6	Grizzlies	42.8
Jazz	22.3	Kings	38.5	Pelicans	27.9

Bonus content, if you made it this far. I'm not a data viz guy, so this is pretty basic, but I made a chart in excel of the average age, weighted by minutes, for every team in the NBA this year. Quick commentary: Holy shit the Clippers are old! Rough look for the Kings, who are sneaky old with no real prospects. And the Pelicans stink, but they're so young! Zion is somehow only 25 and Kevon Looney is (go ahead and guess, I'll bury the answer at the end of the notes). [5]

[1] I'm doing my best to take an accurate snapshot a week or two before the season from the lowest vig numbers, but ultimately these lines are not incredible accurate, the limits are low, and I'm expecting to beat them.

[2] Pacers and Celtics are the obvious candidates here with major injuries to their All-NBA players.

[3] No fucking way!

[4] Shoutout Phoenix Suns: compiling a roster of exclusively shooting guards and centers is a good idea, I mean it’s not like they’re the two most overrated positions in the league!

[5] 29. There's no fucking way you guessed anything that didn't start with a 3, don't lie to me.

Failing Up

In light of the [insert any superlative you want here] trade in NBA history, I’ve been bombarded with “what the hell happened?” messages. So, I figured I’d write a quick primer on what the hell did, in fact, happen. [1]

To start, we need to establish just how good Luka Dončić (25) and Anthony Davis (31) are.

DARKO and EPM are the two most respected publicly available player projection models. The easiest way for someone unfamiliar with one-number metrics to gauge their credibility is to simply look at the top players in each and see if those rankings pass the smell test. That doesn’t mean these metrics are infallible, but it strongly suggests they’re on the right track.

So, we’ll go with this: Luka Dončić is approximately a +6 player, and Anthony Davis is approximately a +4 player. That seems fair. In plain English, Doncic is a perennial MVP candidate, and Davis is a perennial All-NBA player.

Since Dončić and Davis are in very different phases of their careers, and DARKO projections show career trajectory, let’s take a look at an aging curve. This one is from over a decade ago, but the rough shape is all that matters.

As you can see, Luka is a +6 player who might still be improving, while Davis is a +4 player who’s probably just about to fall off a cliff.

Now, let’s take a quick intermission for the oopsies portion of the program to address the elephant in the room: the guy who’s about to get obliterated for probably the worst trade since Trae Young and a first were dealt for Luka Dončić (before Nico Harrison was with the Mavs).

You’ve probably seen this quip about how bad Nico Harrison was at his job at Nike. I mean, it’s on Wikipedia, so it must be true:

“During his work at Nike, he botched a 2013 presentation to Stephen Curry, where according to Harrison he may have called him Seth, and the presentation used was made for Kevin Durant. This, along with not offering Curry a signature shoe, caused the superstar to switch from Nike and sign with Under Armour.[4]”

The name mix-up is one thing, but using KD’s presentation? That seems like an immediate firing offense, and the fact that he somehow ended up running an NBA franchise makes me think he knows where the bodies are buried. I know life operates more on cronyism than meritocracy, but even that seems like a bridge too far.

OK, back to our regularly scheduled “analysis.”

How can we quantify the difference between a +6 and +4 player over the next few years? Well, it’s about the same as the difference between a good starter like De’Aaron Fox and a league-average starter like Coby White. In the NBA, it’s nearly impossible to make up that kind of surplus value in one max salary slot, which is why players of this caliber are essentially never traded. Instead, they’re typically held onto far past their prime. Then overpaid. Then they get a statue outside the arena. [2]

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that an unprotected 2029 first-round pick is heading from Los Angeles to Dallas in the deal. That pick could be valuable, given how awful the Lakers’ roster is outside of Luka and LeBron (40!). But realistically, Luka Dončić, cap space, and sunshine should be good for 45 wins a year for the foreseeable future. And while there isn’t much room for the Lakers to improve outside of this trade, Anthony Davis, cap space, and sunshine was more like a 35-win team.

So that’s it. A story of failing upwards—for both Nico Harrison and the Los Angeles Lakers.

[1] Spoiler alert: there was probably some crazy shit that went down behind the scenes, possibly related to sweet tea consumption, but since this blog doesn’t know anyone in the Mavs or Lakers organization, I’ll have to deal with exclusively publicly available information.

[2]

2025 Win Projections

This is the third year I’ve posted my win projections publicly. Last year, my delta was 7.1, while Vegas had a delta of 6.4. The previous year, I had a delta of 5.9 compared to Vegas’s 6.3. So, we’re about even? I will continue betting on the delta of my projections against anything publicly available, including Vegas.

Vegas is much better this year. Last year, I was off by an average of 2.7 wins per team; this year, it’s only 1.6! Even though I "lost" last year, I think Vegas’s improvement is pretty incredible. I know the limits are so low that no one is betting more than a used Toyota on season win totals… but still. Markets aren’t efficient, but they’re improving quickly, and it’s important to have a healthy respect for them [1].

To be honest, there weren’t many surprises this year. One thing I found interesting is that some of my best bets from last year are also some of my best bets this year—but in the opposite direction! The Kings and the Pistons were among my strongest unders last year, and this year they’re some of my strongest overs. Meanwhile, the Raptors were one of my top overs last year, but this year, their lack of depth makes them one of my best unders.

But really, this exercise isn’t about beating the market. It’s about analyzing teams’ various strengths and weaknesses—where their depth falls off, which players might be poised for a breakout year, and who might be nearing a decline. I’ll share some data from my process that highlights overall weaknesses. The chart below shows three fairly simple but illuminating metrics. This is a team’s age, creation, and spacing weighted by projected minutes [2]. I didn’t project these metrics with an aging curve, but they still provide insight into where a team might be deficient [3].

One of the first takeaways is that contenders like Philadelphia and Milwaukee are relying on extremely old supporting casts. That almost never ends well. This’ll be the third year in a row that I’m betting on the geriatric Bucks to go under [4].

The usage calculation also tells a few stories. Teams like the Raptors, Thunder, and Magic have prioritized defensive versatility and transition (to varying degrees of success!), but they may lack half-court creation when the game slows down. And, of course, the 76ers will have plenty of shot creation due to the addition of Paul George.

The spacing metric highlights some questionable team-building decisions by the Raptors and Lakers [5], who have suspect spacing on the wing and non-shooting bigs. Meanwhile, it praises teams like the Celtics and Knicks, who have spacing at the 5, and the Mavericks and Cavs, whose guards can create unassisted 3s.

To be clear, these stats aren’t terribly important without context, and internal improvement will shore up many of these perceived issues. However, teams need a sufficient balance of various aspects of the game, and creation and spacing are two of the most noteworthy.

Without further ado, let us NBA.

Atlantic		Central		Southeast
Celtics	58.8	Cavaliers	51.8	Magic	48
Knicks	52.2	Pacers	49.1	Heat	40.6
76ers	50.5	Bucks	47	Hawks	37.4
Raptors	27.2	Bulls	29.8	Hornets	29.7
Nets	19.8	Pistons	29.4	Wizards	18.7
Northwest		Pacific		Southwest
Thunder	59.6	Kings	48.5	Mavericks	52.8
Twolves	50.6	Suns	44.8	Grizzles	47.5
Nuggets	49.2	Warriors	42.6	Pelicans	45.6
Jazz	25.3	Lakers	39.2	Rockets	43.7
Trailblazers	21.7	Clippers	34.4	Spurs	34.7

[1] Unless the election is already over.

[2] Creation is USG%, spacing is 3%*volume.

[3] And rookies never really provide spacing anyway.

[4]

[5] As you can probably tell, I’m trying to avoid commenting on the core trying to sag for Flagg.