Saturday, July 31, 2010

Advice? Constructive criticism?

I'm new at this here blogging thing, so if anyone has any suggestions on how to improve the blog (or the content of the blog) please feel free to to give them to me in the form of comments.

Now, obviously, that doesn't mean I want to hear about how much I suck, or how much the Raptors suck, or how great Kobe Bryant is (kidding). I'm asking for constructive criticism. And just because I am taking suggestions doesn't mean that I will implement everything that comes my way, either.

Rest assured, however, that any good idea thrown my way will be hijacked.

 - Devin.

Raptors 2009-2010 team review

Let's revisit my first post on the Wages of Wins Journal. Many people complained that I hadn't noticed that certain players (such as Turkoglu and Johnson) were automatically assigned to incorrect positions. Well, let's see what happens when we adjust the positions manually, shall we? The first table below is WP as calculated automatically by Andres Alvarez's automatic system:
















This second table is what happens when we correctly adjust positions:



As you can see, there isn't much difference between the two. Adjusting Hedo Turkoglu, Amir Johnson, and Reggie Evans doesn't really change the team outlook very much. The Raptors go from a projected total of 36.26 wins to 36.76. And I don't want to hear from anyone that "Chris Bosh isn't a centre", because last year, he was indeed the Raptors' centre.

Now I will admit that, when writing certain parts of my review, I was not paying attention to the correct table. While my overall projection for the coming season is the same, certain of my specific comments relating to certain players need to be adjusted. Hedo Turkoglu, or Turkish Delight, wasn't as bad as I had mentioned. Last year, Turkoglu actually had a WP of 0.088 and produced around 4 wins (instead of a WP of 0.022 and around 1 win). Amir Johnson wasn't as good as I had mentioned; he actually had a WP of 0.181 and produced around 5.5 wins (instead of a WP of 0.252 and around 7.5 wins). Reggie Evans goes from 1.3 wins to around 0.84, which really isn't much of a difference at all.

With that in mind, in a subsequent post I will rewrite my thoughts for the coming season. Now that I'm on my own blog I have to abililty to break my thoughts into more than one post, and I plan to use that to my advantage. I'm also going to be posting individual reviews for each player on the roster for the coming season, as well as covering any more roster changes that may happen between now and the start of the season.

I'll see how this goes, and if all goes well I'll be posting frequently during the season. Hopefully someone will find at least some of this analysis interesting.

 - Devin.