Ages of Success in the NBA: How Unusual are the Blazers? (Updated)

You just made my fanpost last week on this topic look like a pile of puke.

I’ve put less work than this into term-long college research papers. Excellent job. Thanks for putting in the effort.

Extraordinary.

I knew I was looking forward to the next 7 years. Now I know why.

Could you do my taxes next year?

bye

…I agree with all of the above props. This is a very in-depth report on Age vs Production of all NBA teams. Thank you for taking the time to put this together. Posts like this are what make BE great.

   Next we need to factor the experience of these “veteran” teams vs the youthful legs of teams like the Blazers. When the playoffs start, and the Blazers are in, will their fresh legs and athleticism counteract the savvy play of the older dudes?

Now that’s a post.

I tried do something like this a while back on average age of NBA champions. It was garbage compared to this, mainly because I couldn’t figure out how to account for weighting the playing time. Your methods are really good. Any chance you could do this for past NBA champs? How old does a team need to be to win it all?

Thanks. Again, great post.

Now how about giving us an analysis based on the impact of foreign born players on a team’s roster.

btw – Duncan counts as a US player. The Virgin Islands are US territory.

Now I have another question. And I wish I had the time and energy to figure this one out. And I am not sure I will explain it properly, but here goes:

We are one of the youngest teams, we look to be progressing fairly well and quite rapidly. I wonder if there is a correlation between the time the key players play together and getting more familiar with each others game and winning percentage. Obviously Boston last year was a complete anamoly, but if you think of the Spurs, Chicago, Lakers, Pistons, etc.. they all played together for a while before they became championship material. How long does that typically take, what are the variables, etc…..

But maybe it is easier to just say that the longer you play together the better you become and don’t try to prove it one way or the other.

Very good. My brain hurts now.

I can really visualize how we are “rising above the crowd”.

I did graphs like this trying to publish scientific data, so you must be pretty proficient just to whip it out like this. You make several strong points about the potential future of the Blazers, and this should have a calming effect on those fans who are disappointed that we are not championship level yet. There is likely more to come…based on good, scientific evidence, of course.

So based on the projections, in 2 years Boston production declines , LA stays roughly the same and Portland moves up? . Cleveland we have no clue , it’s entirely dependent upon LeBron staying, but if he does stay Cleveland will also stay the same? Is that about right?

Sophia

the BlogFather Henry Abbott linked to your charts in today’s Mini-Bullets.

Kudos, Big Time!

I think HAbbott spends a good amount of time on this site lurking.

this was sick, dude. I earned the enmity of my psychology group because I should be working on a presentation with them right now and instead was reading this post with slack-jawed amazement. What is your background? Are you a professional statistician of some kind?

To me, it’s just for fun and giggles. The season is too early to draw any trends or data points. It’ll be more interesting after a full season’s worth of games.

One thing to remember is to not conclude the Blazers trajectory is going upwards as they age. A sample of 22 games is too small to project. And these graphs only imply a weak correlation, if any, between age and winning percentage, definitely not a causation. So basically, it tells us what we already knew about winning teams. Mostly veterans with experience, so this years Blazers is just bucking the stereotype so far.

Thumbs up for all the work.

jk :)

Looks to me that a look at the chart shows that with another year of experience, and the Blazers are contenders. There is also the real possibility that they could dominate the league for many more years! Hooray math!

There’s a rec, and then there’s a rec.

Everyone thinks the Blazers are abnormally good for their age, but you look at the numbers and prove it up. With graphs and charts and all kind of stuff I used to sorta know how to do on my TI-82 but could never begin to pull off now without gears grinding to a halt in my head and smoke pouring out of both ears…

Bravo.

Along with Dave and Ben’s day-to-day insight and info, these are the kinds of posts that give BlazersEdge such a strong name.

(Mr. Abbott, where you at? This is “First Cup” worthy stuff… )

What’s the correlation coefficient for the age/win % plot and what is it if you only use a linear fit instead of a polynomial fit?

kudos

would be to look at average years in the league and how that translates into winning.

Question – can you come up with a chart that incorporates say, all NBA seasons in the past 20 years? I’d like to know if there is a point where expected wins declines at a certain average age.

Also, perhaps control for age using Salary; or even control for both salary and minutes played. That’d be cool.

Can you redo the charts and color eat dot with the team’s colors. Better yet, can you change each dot to the team logo? I’m sure that wouldn’t take that long at all.

I was going to call you PolishSam or PolymorySam as a joke, but I wasn’t sure you would get it. A lot of folks misspell animalmart1’s name.

thats wut u get for being great, now everybody wants more. outstanding work, a true joy to read. you are sooooooo offishully a part of what makes the BEdge the only sight i turn to for Blazers news and perspective. thank you.

impressive work, obviously.

So, let’s so you are a bad team, like Charlotte. This seems to indicate that if you can simply keep a mediocre unit together past age 28, you’ll have a respectable team. Perhaps that’s actually true. Over the past 5 years, only 2 or 3 age 28+ teams have had losing records.

I think the next step is to follow individual teams over the course of 5-10 years. Are teams getting better (and older) in place, or is team age really a function of free agency, trades, etc.

A few things it would be interesting to investigate:
- Is the median a more stable measure of central tendency than the arithmetic mean?
- What is the relationship of variability (esp. on the ends of the distribution)? (i.e., does it make a difference if you have a team tightly locked around 28 versus if you have a mix of you and older players who average out to 28)
- It would be really neat to include a repeated measures type of analysis into this that would investigate not only winners of the finals but how these age trajectories set up nba dynasties (franchises who win more than half of their possible championships during the time period of some player(s)/coach core or even nba dynasty-lites (franchises who make it to more than half of their finals in post season appearances during the time period of some player(s)/coach core.

You note that you used the data from basketball-reference.com.. did it take a lot of cleaning and prep work to prepare the data set for analysis?

Here I was, not reading it like an idiot, and then I said wowzers and saw it had 45 recs. I mean, I was GOING to read it, but I knew it’d have numbers and numbers are why I have Robots around doing my numbers work.

This was an amazing post, making somewhat complicated (to the idiot, like me) math stuffs into easy to understand words, and shows what we already all assumed— the Blazers are an extremely unique team right now. VERY young, and good (not great, but that’s coming).

The Blazers are also in a very unique situation where while most teams can’t afford to keep all the youth together after the rookie deals are up, we got Papa Allen writing blank checks for KP. Plus, the main core has no known ego or selfishness that might rear it’s ugly head and make keeping the player detrimental to the team.

In addition to our good record and team play, I cannot remember a similar situation to what the Blazers have. The Bulls found success (somewhat, since they only peaked at 49 wins) with youth, but they were pretty average as far as ‘stars’ go. And then, they wasted the cap space and their youth didn’t improve. Some say it could happen to us, but I think our youth just outclasses their youthful core (in every way possible).

It’s just an entirely unique situation. GOOD young players, super rich and committed owner, good smart GM (also young and New Wave with his thinking), cap space, and while there will be a minutes crunch there won’t likely be ego problems in our future.

What other team has been in our situation? It’s uncharted waters, as far as I can remember.

Last season we were the 3rd youngest team ever, and since the 1st and 2nd youngest team won a combined 31 games we were (by default) the most successful team at that age, ever. We ain’t much older this year… if we make the playoffs, would we be the youngest team to ever make the playoffs?

Like I always say, we are extremely lucky to be Blazer fans.

Mortimer

Last year the Blazers were the 3rd youngest team in NBA history.
The 1st and 2nd youngest teams in NBA history only won something like 10 to 12 games, and as we know we won 41 games last year. I didn’t see any numbers on how many games were won by the 4th, 5th, etc. youngest teams in NBA history.
 Do you know how young the Blazers are VRS history this year? It’s probably not significant this year, but their win% VRS age this year seems to be way over the statistical norm.