Hollinger's Predictions: Impact of Harden Trade

[Sħãlïq™]

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For starters, I think the pieces these teams landed are the ones that will play all season for them. Harden, clearly, isn't going anywhere -- he'll have a five-year max deal by the time you're done handing out candy on Wednesday. The other pieces Houston received are fungible and have no impact on its projection. Similarly, Jeremy Lamb isn't moving anytime soon, and Kevin Martin seems unlikely to relocate without a Godfather-type offer from another club. As a result, we can fairly cleanly analyze the difference pre- and post-trade. Before the trade, my model had the Thunder winning 58 games. Taking Harden and Daequan Cook out of the Thunder rotation and adding in Lamb and Martin takes them down a peg, even though I projected Martin to do better in Oklahoma City than I had him doing in Houston.

 

Keeping Martin's other adjustments the same, using my standard rookie score for Jeremy Lamb and tweaking minutes for other players to adjust for the Thunder likely playing a bit more smallball, and I end up at 54 wins for the Thunder. That's a four-win drop, and at the margin you can see the impact this might have on their title chances -- 58 wins screams contender, while 54 hints more meekly at the chance of a deep playoff run. While it doesn't affect their projected seeding at all, the Thunder grade out as a less-formidable regular-season outfit, and that carries over to how well they project for the postseason, too. All of which makes sense. You don't make a trade like this, largely motivated by cap considerations and draft picks, without taking a step back in the short term.

 

As a result, I have to revise my earlier projection that the Thunder would come out of the West in the postseason. I now would rate San Antonio and the Lakers as having a better chance, and with L.A. getting annihilated every night in preseason I would give the upper hand to San Antonio. Yes, I'm going with the Spurs to win the West, topping the Thunder in a revenge-tinged conference finals. So if I have the Thunder dropping four wins, you might assume I have Houston gaining four. You'd be wrong. These things aren't always linear -- depending on which players are replaced and how minutes are redistributed, trades can have non-matching outcomes.

 

Like this one, for instance. I plugged in Harden as a starting shooting guard with a full complement of minutes, upped Carlos Delfino's minutes with Lamb gone and threw in an end-of-rotation wing from Houston's many choices. The result? Houston bumps all the way up to 37 wins from my initial projection of 27, as adding a full minutes complement of All-Star-caliber wing play represents a major upgrade from Martin's projection (both in minutes and quality). Also, a small portion of the projected improvement comes from a tanking tweak in my model -- basically, the Rockets project to stay in the playoff race long enough that they'll still give a crap in March and April, and that adds a win to their total.

 

Since I have Houston adding 10 wins and the Thunder dropping only four, there's some housekeeping that needs to happen to even things out. I had to grab six wins back from the league's other 28 teams to even the league out at a combined 1230 wins and 1230 losses. In practice, I did this by sucking 6/28th of a win from every club's projection. After that, five teams ended up with their win total rounded down rather than up and lost a win; in other words, Minnesota's projection went from 43.6 to 43.3, so after rounding it kicks the Wolves down from 44 wins to 43. Sacramento, Brooklyn, NY and Milwaukee all suffered similar dings. With one win left to reclaim and Philly's Bynum yet to take the court, that seemed like an obvious choice to grab a final win away and even the till. Finally, in the process of revising the estimates for Houston and Oklahoma City, I discovered that my initial set of projections had inadvertently jobbed the Magic out of a win. Break out the champagne, Orlando: You're now No. 29.

 

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Denver over OKC? I don't see that happening.

[Warren2ThaG]

explain more in details, precise though