Raptors Preseason Review #2 (of 4)

This article uses the Wins Produced metric to discuss the productivity of NBA players. This metric is based on box score statistics that are adjusted for other factors including pace, position and team. A general scale is given for these, and links to advanced explanations are listed at the bottom of the page.

Wins Produced per 48 Minutes (WP48) – The number of wins a player produces in 48 minutes of play. 0.100 is average and 0.250 is considered the “superstar threshold”. A player a WP48 of 0.000 produces no wins, and any player with a negative WP48 produces a negative number a wins (or, if you prefer, a positive number of losses) 

Here are the Raptors' numbers after four (of eight) preseason games:



As you can see, there have been a few changes in the team rankings. How have things changed?



Looking at the numbers, here are my thoughts:

• Notice the general trend of players with larger EWP48s becoming less productive, and the players with highly negative WP48s becoming more productive? That's regression to the mean. The players at the top were performing abnormally well, and the players at the bottom were performing abnormally poorly; it was only a matter of time before things normalized
• Productive players who played poorly over the last two games: Weems, DeRozan, Kleiza, and Dorsey
• Productive players who have stayed productive: Jack
• Unproductive players who continued to play poorly: Bargnani and Calderon
• Unproductive players who were productive: Evans, Dupree, Barbosa, Wright
• Jack had a huge game against the 76ers: EWP48 0.824, EWP 0.566
• Jack had a terrible game against the Bulls: EWP -0.359, EWP -0.195
• Kleiza had a terrible game against the 76ers: EWP -0.345, EWP -0.129
• Bargnani's best game so far: v. Bulls,  EWP -0.074, EWP -0.040
• Calderon's best game so far: v. Bulls,  EWP 0.001, EWP 0.000
• The last two games have been a better indication of how things are going to go during the regular season, because the Bulls will be a good team and the 76ers are going to be bad

Nothing is too far out of the ordinary for the Raptors so far, apart from the play of Jose Calderon. If he plays like this during the regular season, the Raptors are going to struggle to break 20 wins.

That's right - 20.

 - Devin

• All basic NBA stats, including play time, salary, and age, are from Basketball-Reference
• Shooting data by location are from Hoopdata
• The Wins Produced (WP and WP48) metric is the work of Berri and Schmidt. I use the Automated Wins Produced site, which is powered by data from Basketball-Reference and Yahoo Sports and put together by Andres Alvarez.
• Positional averages (for PPS, etc) are from The Wages of Wins.