It's been an up-and-down season for the Oklahoma City Thunder. The peaks mostly have come during the rare stretches when Thunder stars Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant have been healthy, and the valleys when they have not. Earlier this season, Oklahoma City struggled to a 3-12 start with its stars ailing, a hole that the Thunder didn't quite dig out of until their current six-game winning streak.
Just when it looked like Oklahoma City was going to put a stranglehold on the last playoff spot in the West, down goes Durant again. Perhaps, as the team says, there is no new injury and hopefully Durant won't be out long. The bottom line is the Thunder must hold off the New Orleans Pelicans and Phoenix Suns without the league's greatest scorer, at least for a period of time.
While there is no doubt that the Thunder will miss a player of Durant's caliber for as long as he's out, the fact is Oklahoma City is much better positioned to withstand his absence than it was earlier in the season. After the dealing of general manager Sam Presti at last Thursday's trade deadline, the Thunder feature a deeper, more stable and more experienced roster than the one they opened the season with. In fact, only one team in the league has strengthened its roster more since the season tipped off on Oct. 28.
To measure this effect, I went to the columns of my system (NBAPET) that calculate the ongoing win percentage baseline for every player in the league. The idea is to capture the "true talent" behind the performance of each player and watch how it evolves as the season progresses. The system looks at the last three years of data plus current season performance, weighs recent production more heavily and tacks on a standard aging adjustment. The end result isn't as rigorous as the formal projections we put together in the preseason, but it does give you an idea of where each player is in his career. More so than by simply looking at what he's done this season, if only because of statistical regression.
Finally, by using the new win percentage baseline and the actual number of minutes each player is on pace to play this season, we can estimate how many wins above replacement (WARP) each player will be worth going forward. When you tally up these WARP totals for the teams as their rosters stood on opening night, and compare it to the sum for current rosters, we can at a glance see which GMs have added the most win-ready production to their teams since the season began.
Let's look at the top five most improved rosters.
1. Miami Heat: (16.5 added WARP)
