2013-2014 NBA Preview

It’s time for some basketball! Opening tip-off is tomorrow night, and it’s the start of an 8-month journey to crown a champion. A lot of pressing questions are going to be answered. Will the Heat three-peat? Will Derrick Rose return to MVP form with the Bulls? Can the Spurs bounce back from their devastating loss in the 2013 NBA Finals? When will Kobe return? Do the Clippers make the jump under new head coach Doc Rivers?

I don’t have answers to these questions just yet, but what I can do is offer my power rankings, from 30 to 1. I’ve also taken the opportunity to throw in some of my favourite GIFs from last season. Here we go.

Rebuild Mode

30) Philadelphia 76ers; 29) Phoenix Suns; 28) Orlando Magic; 27) Boston Celtics; 26) Sacramento Kings; 25) Utah Jazz; 24) Charlotte Bobcats.

This is the Riggin’ for Wiggins group, probably as crowded of a group of “rebuilding” teams as we’ve seen in recent memory. That’s probably due to the strength of the 2014 draft, which is being hyped as one of the best in the past decade. Along with Andrew Wiggins, there are up to 8 potential future all-stars according to ESPN insider Chad Ford.

Besides the lottery, it’ll be interesting to see which players from this group are traded. Guys like Rajon Rondo and Jeff Green in Boston, Spencer Hawes in Philly, Emeka Okafor in Phoenix (who was just acquired from Washington) and Aaron Afflalo in Orlando are all players to keep an eye on. Otherwise, not much to look forward to for this group in 2013-2014. Except maybe Kris Humphries becoming the first player to be rejected by a referee with two different teams, now that he’s in Bean-town.

Outside Looking In

23) Los Angeles Lakers

This is one of the biggest wildcard rankings, because it depends a lot on Kobe Bryant. I mean, it usually does anyway, but right now the Black Mamba is recovering from his torn achilles, and we’re still not sure when he’ll be back. He could come back in mid-October, just like he could come back in December. But even with Kobe, there isn’t much talent after him and Pau Gasol. Plus, Mike d’Antoni is still the coach somehow. I can’t see them making the playoffs either way.

What do you think about this upcoming season, Kobe?

22) Milwaukee Bucks

21) Toronto Raptors

I’ve written about this before, but I really think the Raptors are attacking this season with the wrong mindset. This isn’t a team that can contend, far from it. Best case scenario, they make the playoffs with the 7th or 8th seed and get swept in the 1st round by the Heat, Pacers or Bulls. Worst case scenario, they finish 9th, don’t make the trades they need to (cough Rudy Gay cough), get a mid-round draft pick and stay mediocre for years to come. I think Jonas Valanciunas is going to be one of the best centers in the league eventually, just not right now. Toronto should take its lumps this year, pick up some important pieces, and go for it in the future. But the way the team is set up right now, I’m scared that the Raps are headed for the worst case 9th-place finish.

20) New Orleans Pelicans, 19) Washington Wizards, 18)  Portland Trail Blazers

This is an interesting little trio of teams, all relatively young squads that have shown flashes of being good. They also each have a young soon-to-be star (Anthony Davis with the Pelicans, John Wall with the Wizards, Damien Lillard with the Blazers) who could make a big jump this year. If they do, it wouldn’t be surprising to see any of these teams in the playoffs.

17) Dallas Mavericks

We could be in store for a big year from Dirk after a year in which he struggled with injuries. If that’s the case, watch out, the Mavs might just be a lot better than some people think. The trio of Jose Calderon, Monta Ellis and Nowitzki could actually be very good (on offense anyway).

Playoff bound

16) Atlanta Hawks

15) Cleveland Cavaliers; 14) Minnesota Timberwolves 13) Detroit Pistons

Three teams on the upswing here. For Cleveland, a lot will depend on what they can get from Andrew Bynum. We know Kyrie Irving is a stud, but that’s a young lineup that could use some big minutes from a guy who’s already been there (say what you will, but Bynum was part of 2 Lakers championships). In Minnesota, the key thing will be keeping Ricky Rubio and Kevin Love together healthy, whereas Detroit’s big question is how the frontcourt of Greg Monroe, Andre Drummond and Josh Smith will work.

12) Denver Nuggets

11) New York Knicks

10) Memphis Grizzlies

On the other hand, these are three teams that could take a slight step back from last year. Denver lost Andre Iguodala to the Warriors and will be without one of their best scorers in Danilo Gallinari for a while as he’s recovering from a torn ACL, not to mention they lost last year’s Coach of the year (George Karl) to retirement and Executive of the year (Masai Ujiri) who left for Toronto. But the Nuggets are fun, and they have great celebrations, like this Italian one!

And this one, where Javale McGee is cooking something delicious.

In New York, the Knicks lineup doesn’t look like it’ll be able to get very many stops, especially if they decide to play Amar’e Stoudemire and Andrea Bargnani together. Teams like the Bulls, Cavs, Wizards and Pistons have all improved, so that’s going to take wins away from New York.

Similar idea in the West, the top teams improved, while the Grizzlies haven’t done anything to shore up the lack of scoring aside from Zach Randolf and Marc Gasol.

True contenders

9) Golden State Warriors

One of the funnest teams in the league. Steph Curry is ready to become a superstar, Andrew Bogut is healthy, and Andre Iguodala adds much-needed perimeter defence. Plus, the whole yellow thing in the arena is awesome. They’re fun to watch on many levels. Hopefully Steph will give more love to his teammates this year though.

8) Brooklyn Nets; 7) Houston Rockets

Two of the big movers in the offseason, both in terms of actual players and title hopes. The Nets, of course, made a big splash at the trade deadline, landing Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce in a massive trade, making their starting lineup one of the highest-paid in NBA history. (The NBA would be so much fun if every team was owned by a Russian billionaire who didn’t care how many millions he had to pay in luxury taxes).

Houston, on the other hand, landed the biggest fish in the free agent pond when they lured Dwight Howard away from the Lakers (although, admittedly, it didn’t take much convincing to get Howard out of LA). Getting the best center in the league to play with the best 2-guard in the league in James Harden (until Kobe Bryant gets back at least) suddenly makes the Rockets a nice bet to compete for the West title.

6) Oklahoma City Thunder; 5) San Antonio Spurs; 4) Indiana Pacers; 3) Chicago Bulls

All of these teams have a very legitimate shot of winning the title. They all have their weaknesses, but their strengths are too great to ignore. Kevin Durant is the best pure scorer in the league, but the questions for OKC are Russell Westbrook’s health and depth scoring. For the Spurs, it’s always tough to bet against Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Gregg Popovich, but age and mileage might start to take their toll on the club. Plus, who knows what effect the devastating loss to Miami will have on the team’s psyche. No matter how strong you are mentally, it’s tough to get this out of your head.

Over in the East, the Pacers showed they can keep up with the Heat last year, and they’ve improved that team for this year with the acquisition of Luis Scola and the return of Danny Granger. The Bulls are getting Derrick Rose back, and they have as good a five-man defensive unit as any in the league. But the question for both Chicago and Indiana is finding a way to contain LeBron, because nobody in the East has been able to in the past 3 years. Nobody is questioning either team’s physicality, however.

2) Los Angeles Clippers

Take one of the most explosive, high-tempo offenses in the league, add in some good shooters and you have what should be the best scoring unit in the league. As Grantland writer Zach Lowe explains in this column, “they’ve got killer shooting in J.J. Redick and Jared Dudley to dot the floor around Chris Paul–Griffin pick-and-rolls, and above Griffin post-ups.” Deadly. Matt Barnes is a solid defender, but they should add another by trading away Jamal Crawford. Otherwise, they might be exposed once again in the playoffs.

Oh, and they’re always good for a few spectacular dunks every game. And not just Blake Griffin.

1) Miami Heat

It’s just too hard to bet against LeBron James. Dwyane Wade looks like he’s getting a bit more healthy, and they still have most of the same pieces that helped them win two consecutive titles. And look for Greg Oden to rejuvenate his career with the Heat; Miami already kind of did the same with the Birdman, Chris Andersen, so why not Oden? If there’s one team that can do just that, it’s the defending champions.

And even if Oden doesn’t pan out, LeBron can will a championship by himself. He knows what a three-peat would mean to his legacy. He’s always comparing himself to MJ, and a three-peat is a big part of that. Don’t forget that all 3 guys from the Big-3 are in contract years this year; that’s a big deal.

That’s why I see the Heat three-peating, beating the Clippers in 7 games and winning the 2014 NBA Finals.

Which, of course, means more of my favourite version of LeBron: the “go ahead and hate, I’m the King” Lebron.

NHL Metric Takeover : Forward Production Rating (FPR)

It’s a pretty common occurrence.

Just about every year for the past 5 years, at the end of the NBA season, you can look to John Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Rating (PER) to find LeBron James’ name at the top of the list. PER is a fancy metric stat that measures just about everything a player does on a basketball court and converts it into one number. It has generally been accepted as a very reliable indication of how good a player really is. Case in point, pretty much everyone in the world considers LeBron to be the best player in the NBA, and PER confirms it.

That’s not the case in hockey. There isn’t one statistic or number that accurately measures exactly how good a player really is. Sure, points can tell you his offensive output, but it doesn’t tell you anything about his defensive play. Plus-minus gives in indication of a player’s ability to help his team score more goals than it allows while he’s on the ice, but often this number relies too much on luck and/or circumstance. Newer metrics like Corsi and Fenwick look to measure the shot differential a player is responsible for while he’s on the ice, but teams don’t win with shot attempts, so it doesn’t reflect enough of what a player does.

Just like Lebron is to the NBA, Sidney Crosby is widely considered as the best player in hockey (yes, I just linked to Wayne Gretzky saying it, that counts as “widely” to me). But there isn’t one stat that assuredly confirms that perception. Or maybe we think he is the best player when really he isn’t. Either way, there isn’t one thing a fan can look at to make the judgment either way, So, just like everyone else does in their spare time, I decided to create a measure of a player’s effectiveness on the ice, which I will hereafter refer to as Forward Production Rating (FPR).

Limits and additional information

Now, before I go any further, I need to underline a few things. First, I don’t think FPR is perfect by any means. I spent a while working on it, trying to adjust the formula, but I’m sure it can still be improved upon.

Second, as you may have realized by its description, the rating can only measure forward productivity (or defenceman who play like forwards…I’m looking at you, Kris Letang). It says nothing for (most) defenceman or goaltenders. That’ll come another day. (A goalie metric would be easy, in fact one does already exist, called WORP. But trying to measure all the subtleties of playing defense is too much of a mountain to climb at this point). For now, we’ll stick to forwards.

Third, all the statistics I use are 5-on-5 numbers. I think this best measures a player’s effectiveness. Generally, the players that are most productive at 5-on-5 are equally (if not more) productive on the powerplay. As for penalty kill specialists, they probably get hurt the most by this rating, but then again, they don’t give $60 million contracts to the guy who scores 3 goals a year.

Fourth, as you’ll see below, the rating most benefits forwards who are productive (hence the name). It shouldn’t be considered to be a “value added” rating, but more of a true production rating. Selke nominees won’t necessarily shine here, but it doesn’t mean they’re not good players. I’ll let someone else come up with the “value added” measure.

Finally, I need to to shout out my buddy René Madden, (@Rmad08 on twitter), my statistics expert who who helped polish the formula for this brand new rating and who helped me be more clear in my explanations.

The formula

(All the hard stats I use below can be found on behindthenet.ca, I didn’t invent them myself. FPR is the result of manipulating those stats).

Earlier in this post, I mentionned some stats that can useful on their own but that don’t tell us everything. That being said, if you combine them, they can begin to tell a much bigger story. This is what I attempted to do. I tried to combine a forward’s point production, individual plus-minus influence and on-ice shot differential, and then multiplied everything by his time on ice. Here’s what the formula looks like:

That may look really complicated, but it’s not, I promise. I’ll use Crosby’s 2012-2013 season as the example.

– TOIgame  is simply the amount of time a player gets per game. For Crosby in 2012-2013, it was 15.53 minutes.

– Rel.Corsi, or relative corsi,  is a metric stat developped by behindthenet.ca that measures the shot attempt differential for which a player is on the ice (his team vs. the opposing team) while scaling down according to the relative quality of his teammates. Shot attempts include shots on goal and missed shots (not blocked shots). I divided this number by 10 because, generally, one shot attempt is worth about one-tenth of a goal. So Crosby’s number for this variable is 2.03. To give you a comparable, Eric Staal, who had the second most points per 60 minutes, had a -0.43, so his final rating will put him much lower than 2nd because of it.

– P60mins  is the amount of points a player produces for every 60 minutes. In 2012-2013, Crosby scored an impressive 4.19 points per 60 minutes. In the formula, I scale this variable by a factor of 2 to raise the importance of the variable. Generally, we consider points to be probably the most important statistic for a forward, so I attempted to reflect this. For Crosby, this turns into 8.38.

– PlusMinusDifferential60mins  is the difference between a player’s plus-minus per 60 minutes and the plus-minus per 60 minutes of his team while he’s off the ice. In other words, if a forward finishes the season with a plus-minus per 60 minutes of 1.00, but his team has a plus-minus per 60 minutes of 2.00 when he’s off the ice, he still garners a -1.00 because his team was worse overall when he was on the ice. In 2012-2013, Crosby had a 2.86 PlusMinusDifferential60mins. In essence, his team scored 2.86 more goals than its opponent when Crosby was on the ice compared to when he was off.

– Finally, I multiply everything by 0.1,  scaling everything down to have easier numbers to deal with. You’ll see what I mean with the examples I provide, but Crosby’s 20.61 (compared to Kunitz’s 15.67) seems easier to grasp than 206 to 156.

So let’s go back to the formula.

using Crosby’s 2012-2013 numbers, it looks like this:

FPR (Crosby) = 0.1*15.53*[2.03 + 8.38 + 2.86]

FPR (Crosby) = 20.61

The Results

So Crosby earns a 20.61 FPR for last year’s effort, but that doesn’t tell us anything on its own. We obviously need to compare it with the others to properly rate him. For that reason, here are the top 20 FPRs for 2012-2013. (Players must have played at least 20 of 48 games).

1. Sidney Crosby – 20.61
2. Chris Kunitz – 15.67
3. Henrik Sedin – 14.51
4. Taylor Hall – 13.85
5. Pascal Dupuis – 13.61
6. Daniel Sedin – 13.19
7. Alexander Semin – 13.16
8. Jonathan Toews – 13.13
9. Andrew Ladd – 13.13
10. Rick Nash – 13.06
11. Patrice Bergeron – 13.03
12. Tyler Seguin – 12.97
13. Eric Staal – 12.97
14. Justin Williams – 12.54
15. Brad Marchand – 12.43
16. Nazem Kadri – 12.15
17. Derek Stepan – 11.91
18. Anze Kopitar – 11.19
19. Martin St. Louis – 10.92
20. Jiri Tlusty – 10.92

Pretty strong list.  According to this, Crosby was in fact the best player in 2012-2013, something that wasn’t really debated. A few things stand out though, like the fact that Kunitz and Dupuis both rank in the top-5. Obviously the fact that they played with Crosby helps, but at the same time, they did play well, and you can’t take that away from them. Seguin, Bergeron and Marchand are all in the top-15, and they also played on the same line.

It seems like FPR will benefit players that play on strong lines, but when you think about it, that’s not unfair. When teams played the Penguins last year, they were crushed by the Crosby line, so it’s fair that they all be ranked high. Maybe not that high, but in a short sample size (48 games), statistical outliers are common.

Another notable element is that 2012-2013 MVP winner, Martin St. Louis, finishes only 18th (10.92). FPR doesn’t like the fact that St. Louis had mediocre shot and plus-minus differentials, or that many of his points came on the powerplay. Again, inexact science, but it’s a start.

How about a bigger sample size, like a normal 82 game season? Here’s the top FPRs for 2011-2012 (with at least 60 games played).

1. Evgeni Malkin – 15.40
2. Steven Stamkos – 13.34
3. Patrick Sharp – 13.04
4. Alexander Steen – 12.53
5. Ray Whitney – 12.28
6. Henrik Sedin – 11.86
7. Tyler Seguin -11.80
8. Jamie Benn – 11.60
9. Joe Thornton  -11.42
10. Patrice Bergeron – 11.28

Not bad. Malkin won the MVP that year, and FPR backs him up, while Stamkos, who is second on this list, was also a Hart trophy nominee (the other was candidate was Henrik Lundqvist).

Now the top 10 for 2010-2011 (again, with at least 60GP).

1. Daniel Sedin – 17.15
2. Bobby Ryan – 15.18
3. Anze Kopitar – 14.88
4. Henrik Sedin – 14.57
5. Alex Ovechkin – 14.54
6. Ryan Getzlaf – 13.81
7. Justin Williams – 13.37
8. Rick Nash – 13.32
9. Milan Lucic – 12.92
10. Martin St. Louis – 12.89

Interesting. Bobby Ryan and Ryan Getzlaf both find themselves on the list, but it was linemate Corey Perry who actually won the MVP that year (over Daniel Sedin, who was first in FPR, and St. Louis). Perry was 16th on this list (12.53). Another example of the super-line effect.

Ok, one more year, 2009-2010.

1. Daniel Sedin  – 17.63
2. Alex Ovechkin – 17.39
3. Henrik Sedin  -15.88
4. Sidney Crosby – 12.94
5. Zach Parise – 12.68
6. Nicklas Backstrom – 12.57
7. Marian Gaborik – 12.31
8. Wojtek Wolski – 11.74
9. Ryan Getzlaf – 11.31
10. Dustin Penner – 11.22

That year, Henrik defeated Ovechkin in MVP voting, ending his hopes of a three-peat. Even though Daniel was a bit more effective than his twin brother according to FPR, he played only 63 games, so he wasn’t really considered for the MVP race. Crosby, who is 4th here, was the other finalist. I don’t know how Dustin Penner made it on that list, but I guess anything can happen when you reduce players to numbers.

Probably the biggest omission from these lists is Pavel Datsyuk, generally considered to be one of the best, if not the best two-way forward in the league. (He did rank decently high in every FPR list, just not top-10 high). The only reason I can see to justify that is that his points per 60 minutes at 5-on-5 aren’t as strong as they would need to be to rank him higher.

Going forward

So there you have it. A new metric to look for. I’ll be updating this season’s FPR rankings at least a few times throughout the year to see if they mesh with our perceptions of the best forwards in the league. Maybe I’m onto something. Or maybe I just wasted my time. Either way, it was a fun exercise.