After a ton of math and fudging, I’ve come up with these estimates for how much a “tightened rotation” will help each team in the playoffs. I took close games between playoff teams in the past 1.5 months, figured out the top rotation (MPG/player) for each team when everyone’s healthy, and took the max of that and the average of all playoff teams’ average top rotation minutes split. Then, I compared that tight rotation with the average MPG for each player over the season. I truncated the list when each rotation reached 240 minutes total. Then, to see how much that helps each team, I used ASPM and RAPM for each player with that MPG and calculated the team sum both for the short rotation and for the idealized long rotation.
Yeah, it’s a bit clunky, but it sorta makes sense.
I still can’t get the Lakers to look dominant, though…
I did it for every team above -1.25 Efficiency differential. I forgot that the Pacers were below that (!) so I guess I’ll use the average for them!
| Team | Tightened Benefit |
|---|---|
| HOU | 2.20 |
| MEM | 1.80 |
| PHO | 1.66 |
| NOH | 1.61 |
| SAS | 1.52 |
| PHI | 1.18 |
| ORL | 1.14 |
| DAL | 1.09 |
| LAL | 0.92 |
| DEN | 0.88 |
| MIA | 0.80 |
| BOS | 0.64 |
| ATL | 0.63 |
| OKC | 0.59 |
| NYK | 0.29 |
| POR | 0.22 |
| CHI | 0.16 |
| Average | 1.02 |
Yeah, it doesn’t help the really deep teams to tighten their rotations. Some of those numbers look a bit odd. I don’t have time at this point to check them, though!
any chance you could share the minutes% for each player? I’d like to use it for the RAPM ratings 🙂
I don’t think they’re valid for each player. I do have a spreadsheet that goes through and scrapes all the box scores off of BBref that you specify–that’s how I came up with this. Scrape the close games between playoff teams and try to rough in minutes distributions based on those close games compared to the season as a whole.
It’s really clunky, though, and I’m not sure it’s totally valid for individual players. More of a ballpark figure.
BTW: I do not like trying to predict minutes distributions. It’s a headache!
Somehow, I don’t think it will really help Houston much…