Best Publicly Available NBA Projections

With the surge in popularity of sports betting, NBA Win Totals have gone mainstream. It’s a useful exercise—a macro look at an NBA season which is long and filled with the variance of injuries, drama, and shot luck. While people love to predict sides, rarely do they want to set lines themselves, and even more rarely do they want to pony up their own money on it. Well, these are the best publicly available win projections. And I’ll bet on it [1].

Professionally [2], I live by a fairly easy motto: ABQ. Always Be Quantifying. So this year I went through every NBA team, aggregated minutes projections, added an aging curve to some of my favorite available one number metrics, and threw in a splash of subjective adjustment when necessary [3].

Often we think we know something the market doesn’t, but we don’t. The market is vast and its incentive structure (making money!) is robust. In this case, I know I don’t know anything that the market doesn’t. I’m just a guy, armed with some numbers and a bias toward liking NBA players that can pass, shoot, and try on defense.

This process surprised me (as good quantifying often does!). I didn’t expect to like the Hawks, or the Knicks, or the Raptors nearly as much as I do. I was shocked that I couldn’t find more wins for contenders like the Clippers or Bucks.

Most of these win projections don’t need much clarification: The Wolves, Mavericks, and Nuggets are 50 win teams. The Trailblazers, Wizards and Bulls are exceptionally mediocre. And the tankers are tanking [4].

This blog, of course, is not a suggestion that you should try to bet the penny stakes limits that cowardly sports betting sites will allow you to bet on season long win totals. But were you to be able to bet on such a thing, I’d be confident that you’d receive even more pennies back 6 months from now when those pennies will be worth even less due to inflation. But I digress.

The Good

Last year, the Pelicans had a neutral luck adjusted point differential without the best player on their team. Everyone on the roster except CJ McCollum is on the positive side of the aging curve, and one of the back end of the rotation guys is bound to pop as a positive contributor. Zion was the hardest player to project. Without a full season last year, do I give him a two year bump on his aging curve? Or should I assume he’s just been eating jambalaya and won’t improve at all without time on court? Luckily, Vegas is basically projecting them as if Zion won’t play, and I’ve got him projected for 2/3 of the season or so.

Though I don’t see the Raptors winning a playoff series with this version of the team, they’re one of the youngest teams in the league, play hard, and are well coached. They get very thin after their top 9– luckily Nick Nurse wouldn’t dream of going that deep into his bench! This is a 50 win team, with some upside from a larger than expected improvement from Achiuwa or Barnes.

The 76ers are no longer a niche pick to challenge for the top seed in the East. They’re good, deep, and not as reliant as you think on having Harden be an All-NBA level player. I have my reservations in the playoffs, but in the regular season this team will be a dynamo, provided the big fella stays healthy.

The Hawks, Knicks, and Kings are the three teams that surprised me the most. I don’t think the Hawks have much chance to win a playoff series, and I don’t think the Knicks or the Kings have much chance of making the playoffs, but the math is the math: they’re decent teams that go 10 deep. And Immanuel Quickley is one of the most underrated players in the league [5].

I have to write a quick paragraph about the Magic, the darlings of my basketball heart. Given my love for Franz Wagner, I tried as hard as possible to be conservative on my projections for this team. But I still like the over. While they're lacking the future resources of some of the other rebuilds, it's noteworthy how much better the Magic are right now than the Pistons, Rockets, and Thunder. Thankfully it looks like Jalen Suggs will be back for the start of the regular season, as a serious injury would have been a nightmare. If you moved 1000 of his minutes to RJ Hampton (one of the worst players in the league), it would be worth two wins!

The Bad

I would put the Bucks in my top tier of contenders this season (along with the Clippers and Celtics), but the regular season numbers just don’t show how the Bucks should be projected to win over 50 games. Wesley Matthews, George Hill, and Serge Ibaka are ready for taxidermy; Jevon Carter, Jordan Nwora, and MarJon Beauchamp are deer in the headlights. They may get a buyout guy, and Bud’s regular season preparation is as good as anyone’s, but even squinting only gets them to 50, and I see their line above that in most places.

The Rockets are part of an interesting phenomenon. When you project some of these particularly young teams who have a half dozen guys that are barely old enough to drink, a few of them will have outsized results, and those players will earn more playing time. But outliers are outliers because they’re outliers, and there isn’t much I can do beyond try to capture that by giving Jalen Green a little more of a bump than is expected by his aging curve, or pretending Josh Christopher might be able to play merely replacement level basketball instead of league worst type basketball. My raw win total on them without those adjustments was only 16! I do think with the rubberband effect along the poles this is a much more reasonable win projection, but I still don’t see how they get to the mid 20s (or why they'd be motivated to do so).

There’s actually a little bit of that same phenomenon happening with the Warriors. In my opinion, the Warriors young players aren’t particularly interesting. And despite that, one of them will likely be better than expected, and that one will earn rotation minutes alongside what’s left of the Death Lineup. The previous year’s NBA champion has gone under in 5 of the last 7 82 game seasons [6]. And teams with a win projection over 50 have gone under ⅔ of the time in the same sample (though teams with a low win projection have performed about the same as the field).

The Ugly

When incentive structures diverge, it gets hard to model. Some of these teams start this season with the mindset that a loss is a win[7]. It’s difficult to figure out the lengths that a team like the Jazz or Thunder might go to to get Wemby or Scoot. Front offices are probably already having serious conversations about the most damaging young players who you could pretend were prospects but would actually only be on the roster to drive the tank.

The Lakers are another such team whose win projection could best be described as a shrug emoji. They’re a .500 team as constructed, but a trade of Russell Westbrook for Buddy Heild and Myles Turner is worth about 4 wins, which is almost exactly their present Vegas total.

This exercise taught me the value of depth. It showed that where there are serious drop offs in rotations, injuries will provide the projections more fragility. The Lakers, Cavs, Raptors, and Pelicans might all have Vegas totals in the 40s, but they get there with drastically different roster composition. Although fit is overblown, I did dock situations I thought would have diminishing returns in Cleveland, Minnesota, and Atlanta. At the same time I'm also ecstatic to see those situations play themselves out, because there's magic behind the chemistry that goes into winning basketball games, and I'm here for it. Let us NBA.

Atlantic		Central		Southeast
Celtics	56.4	Bucks	48.4	Heat	49
76ers	55	Cavaliers	46.6	Hawks	48.4
Raptors	49.9	Bulls	40.4	Hornets	33.3
Nets	48.1	Pacers	25.6	Wizards	33.2
Knicks	41.3	Pistons	25.1	Magic	30.4
Northwest		Pacific		Southwest
Nuggets	50.8	Clippers	50.3	Mavericks	49.1
TWolves	49.8	Warriors	49.3	Pelicans	49
Trail Blazers	38.9	Suns	49	Grizzlies	48.4
Jazz	26.1	Lakers	41	Spurs	23.6
Thunder	19.2	Kings	36	Rockets	18.1

[1] I’m happy betting a lot on ones that I’m confident in, but don’t mind me if I don’t want to bet on team that has a lot of variance coming into the season like the Lakers or Jazz, or one where I’m only a win or two off the market.

[2] Insofar as I have a job

[3] Machine > man, but if machine doesn’t have to go it alone, it’s even more powerful.

[4] This was, of course, the toughest (and stupidest) part of the exercise.

[5] Hoping to do a deeper dive on IQ early in the season.

[6] And also 5 of the last 6 seasons, but I looked at the last 7 full seasons in my dataset and I wasn’t about to cherrypick for clicks.

[7] As they should be, I estimate about ¼ of the league should be tanking, but only ⅙ of the league is. I mean seriously, you really think Charlotte, Portland, and Washington are kidding anyone? It’s embarrassing, they have nothing on the roster that suggests the ability to win a playoff series in the next decade.