Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Apparently I was being too generous...

...when I predicted that the sixers would get a mediocre back-up forward/center, but one that would still be an improvement over most of our current crop of big men. If form holds, they'll actually be getting a mediocre to piss poor back-up forward/center.

I looked up the Position-Adjusted Win Score per minute (PAWSmin) for this past season of the previous picks in the 12th slot, and the numbers weren't encouraging:
  • 1997 Austin Croshere (-0.030)
  • 1998 Michael Doleac (-0.056)
  • 1999 Aleksandar Radojevic – not in NBA
  • 2000 Etan Thomas (0.052)
  • 2001 Vladimir Radmanovic (-0.087)
  • 2002 Melvin Ely (-0.215)
  • 2003 Nick Collison (0.019)
  • 2004 Robert Swift – injured
  • 2005 Yaroslav Korolev (-0.160)
  • 2006 Hilton Armstrong (-0.020)
For those unfamiliar with it, PAWSmin is one of the "Win" metrics developed by the people from the Wages of Wins (also linked in the side bar). An "average" NBA player will produce a "position-adjusted" Win Score (PAWS) of zero. For a quick and dirty check using PAWSmin, 0.050 is good, 0.100 is great, and 0.150 is fantastic.

Looking at those numbers, Etan Thomas is good, Nick Collison is slightly above average, and you really don't want the rest of these guys playing big minutes for you. Now, I know that just looking at the numbers for this past season might be a bit unfair--after all, the older players on this list (Croshere, Doleac) are probably starting to slow down a little from their peak and the younger players are probably still developing (Swift, Korolev, Armstrong)--but these numbers still don't fill me with hope.
For comparison purposes, the PAWSmin of the 76'ers current big men are listed below:

  • Samuel Dalembert (0.049)
  • Joe Smith (0.003)
  • Steven Hunter (-0.024)
  • Alan Henderson (0.054)
  • Shavlik Randolph (0.040)
Our current big men hardly qualify as great, but the chances that we can improve our frontline through this draft look pretty slim.

[For the record: I'm not entirely sure what I think of the Win Score metrics--I haven't really thought about them enough. They definitely intrigue me, and I'm sure I'll write more about them as I really think through their strengths and weaknesses. For the moment, I thought they gave a quick and easy way to try and compare the players I was interested in.]

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