Sorry about that. I had some purple prose to work out of my system. But since we’re at the beginning of a new season, I thought it would be a good time to unleash my prediction for the Timberwolves’ next season. This is a long and complicated process, which I’ll explain in a lengthy piece here. Skip to the three ellipses if you want to avoid something that sounds like a high school math lecture.
The major problem is that I wanted to try something fairly scientific to determine what happens next. The first half of that is simple. I pulled out the Pythagorean Expected Win-Loss formula (Points16.5/(Points16.5+Opponent’s Points16.5)), which is a predictor of how a team will do in the next season. Of course, I need to know exactly how many points the T-Wolves will score and surrender. Having offended the local witchdoctor, I needed to find a different way to divine the . The first part of it was figuring out who the T-Wolves are going to play, and for how long.
| Player | GP | Min | PTS |
| Blount, Mark | 82 | 1148 | 455 |
| Brewer, Corey | 82 | 1640 | 523 |
| Buckner, Greg | 4 | 154 | 34 |
| Davis, Ricky | 82 | 1510 | 687 |
| Foye, Randy | 82 | 1640 | 727 |
| Gomes, Ryan | 82 | 2132 | 826 |
| Green, Gerald | 82 | 1476 | 699 |
| Howard, Juwan | 4 | 198 | 72 |
| Jaric, Marko | 82 | 1264 | 301 |
| Jefferson, Al | 76 | 3060 | 1460 |
| Madsen, Mark | 4 | 270 | 35 |
| McCants, Rashad | 76 | 1520 | 642 |
| Ratliff, Theo | 70 | 1050 | 270 |
| Smith, Craig | 82 | 1722 | 682 |
| Telfair, Sebastian | 82 | 1066 | 323 |
This is based on my projections of how many minutes each player will have in the season. The games played is there as a rough marker of why I allocated certain minutes in the way that I did. If you’re curious (and I’m sure you’re waiting with bated breath) I’m predicting a starting lineup of Blount/Ratliff,
The problem with this is three guys who should receive significant time this season: Corey Brewer, Rashad McCants, and Theo “the Contract” Ratliff. Brewer has yet to play a minute in regular season action, and McCants and Ratliff are recovering from surgeries that I prefer to describe as “horrific.” So I had to find some numbers and fudge them a little in order to describe (however loosely I could) what these three will do. McCants was the easiest; he had a ghastly 2006-2007 season due to the microfracture surgery (despite what the NBA and the doctors say, it seems to take 12-16 months for a player to recover from this surgery, something I will expand upon when I look a McCants more in depth) and so I simply took his career numbers and expanded them to a 1520 minute season. As for Ratliff, I didn’t know what to expect from him; back surgery at the age of 34 is a serious matter, even for those of us who aren’t 6-10 NBA centers. He only played three games last season, so his number from then were obviously unusable, but there is no way of knowing how similar he will to his pre-surgery form. Lacking a good option, I went with the least bad option and simply expanded out his preseason stats. Which sounds (and is) a crazy way to do it. Of course, I did the same thing with Brewer; these games are the only thing he has played at the NBA level, and even though the game is going to be exponentially more difficult in the regular season, it was the best I had.
So the numbers for Brewer and Ratliff are almost certainly optimistic (I believe the numbers for McCants to be about right, as this year’s model is going to be unrecognizable from the 2006-2007 itineration). However, everyone else’s projected stats are pessimistic. Assuming Wittman and McHale go and stay young, then the way these players will hit my expectations if none of them improve. If Al Jefferson is still a borderline star, if Randy Foye, Craig Smith, and Ryan Gomes continue to play more or less like NBA role players, if Gerald Green and (God help us) Sebastian Telfair play with more promise than skill, and if Ricky Davis doesn’t turn it on in a contract season, then this prediction will be accurate. Anything else is a bonus.
Of course, know the points scored is only half (well, 2/3rds) of the equation. The rest is figuring out how many points the Timberwolves will surrender in the season. To figure this out, first we need to know how many possessions the Timberwolves will have. A large part of how many points a teams scores (7736 for the 2007-2008 Timberwolves) depends on how many possessions a team has. Using the simplified possession formula from Dean Oliver’s Basketball on Paper (Field Goals Attempted + Turnovers + (0.4 * Free Throws) – Offensive Rebounds), the 2007-2008 Timberwolves will have 7529 possessions.
A quick diversion before I continue: these numbers are within the range put up by NBA teams last season, though on the low end. 7736 points would make the T-Wolves the third lowest scoring teams last season (1:
So using this information, we can know build an approximation of how the Timberwolves opponents will fair. If we look at the number of opponent possessions, it differs slightly from the number of possessions a team has. Even though possession always goes back and forth during play, it is possible to start and end a quarter with the ball, which will give you a +1 lead in possessions. It is possible to get as many as 164 additional possessions a season (assuming no overtime) by taking the buzzer beater in every quarter of every game. But I digress. Looking at the numbers from last season, I took the % of total possessions each team had.
As you can see from the chart, it is remarkably consistent. All but 4 teams ended up between 50.2 % and 49.8 %, and 16 teams are between 50.1 % and 49.9% The highs and lows are 49.63% and 50.21%, with the average being 50.00%. So taking this and a formula of Poss% * x = 7529, we find the number of possessions in a Wolves game. Subtracting the 7529 from this, we find that Wolves opponents should have anywhere from 7466 to 7641 possessions next season. Taking those two plus a 50% possession for the Wolves (7529), we can multiply them by the league’s opponents points per possessions numbers how many points the T-Wolves opponents are going to score (the Opp PTS/Poss range from 0.98 to 1.10, with 1.04 as the league average). So from all of this we come with a range of 17 to 59 wins for the Timberwolves.
Helpful, wasn’t that? Okay, seriously, to figure this out I simply assumed the Wolves would be average at defense and percentage of possessions. Doing that, I come out with…
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35 wins for the Wolves! So after all that excitement and drama, why did I give such positive name to this post? Simple: everyone else is expecting them to be somewhere between historically bad and low twenties in wins. 35 wins would be a positive step for the Wolves, showing that they are on par with last season’s team (remember, the Wolves packed it in for the last seven games in order to ensure a draft pick. So they were better than 30 wins. Maybe 2 or 3 wins better, but they were) and pretty much guaranteeing that our draft pick goes to the Clippers after the season. I personally consider that a good thing, as dragging out the process of surrendering the pick simply means that the Wolves have to choose whether they are going postseason or bust every year, which in turn means there are factors besides winning that are part of every game. And stabilization would give the younger players hope as they look towards where they are going to play after their rookie contract finishes. And being that close will certainly allow the Wolves to be part of free agents deals if and when they end get out of salary cap hell.
Personally, I can wait for the Timberwolves next losing season!
---The data used for the basis of this post is from http://www.dougstats.com
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