Eastern Conference | Western Conference
It's that time when we hardworking analysts tie our summer efforts together and declare how each conference has rearranged itself for the coming season. And the Eastern Conference in particular has undergone a major makeover, with the Cavaliers -- now featuring LeBron James and Kevin Love -- transforming from doormat to title contender.
For me, this exercise is actually the punctuation mark for my summer position rankings. That is, I've taken the methodology introduced in that series and pulled it together in a model to estimate team performance.
To extract these projected win baselines from my system, NBAPET, I've used my old methodology based on similarity scores and athletic factors to calculate how many possessions each player will have while he's on the floor and how efficiently he will use them.
This year, I integrated real plus-minus into the process to estimate how players affect the possessions they don't use. Using play-by-play data from Synergy Sports Technologies, I've replicated this process for both ends of the floor. The last two steps are familiar: Estimate playing time based on durability trends and role, then run the preliminary win estimates through a season simulator 1,000 times.
What we're left with are the numbers below, which represent the average number of projected wins for each team in 2014-15.
1. Cleveland Cavaliers (projected wins: 61.7)
If the bet is whether the Cavaliers win the 2015 Finals or the field, you take the field. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine how an objective forecast system would assign better title odds to a team other than Cleveland. On paper, the big four of LeBron James, Kevin Love, Kyrie Irving and Dion Waiters comprise a near-perfect offense, one that should rank in the top five in all of the four factors. The defense projects pretty well, too, though there is plenty of reason to be skeptical of that part of the prediction. We have six months to nitpick about the Cavs; right now they have about a 1-in-3 chance of winning it all.