Average # Seasons Players are Under Contract a Team

[cemitten]

In an effort to building towards doing true data analytics on basketball I gave myself a project. I pulled data for all NBA players from B-R and found the average number of seasons a team had a player under contract. For simplicity's sake, I did not factor in partial seasons. If a player was under contract for 10 games with a team, that shows as one season. This means traded players will be double counted. I went into it with the idea that the larger market teams might have a higher turnover because there might be heavier, win now expectations.

My results were somewhat unexpected. (At least they were to me, with no prior research into the subject) All 30 current teams and even the historical teams hovered right around 2 seasons. For the current 30 teams the median number of seasons was 2.14, with New Orleans having the lowest average at 1.75 and Utah the longest at 2.51.

Code: Select all

ATL	2.17		MIA	2.12
BOS	2.46		MIL	2.11
BRK	1.98		MIN	2.02
CHA	1.97		NOP	1.75
CHI	2.28		NYK	2.44
CLE	2.14		OKC	2.02
DAL	2.14		ORL	2.15
DEN	2.16		PHI	2.13
DET	2.32		PHO	2.23
GSW	2.02		POR	2.25
HOU	2.28		SAC	2.01
IND	2.35		SAS	2.10
LAC	1.92		TOR	1.83
LAL	2.44		UTA	2.50
MEM	1.95		WAS	2.04

[/b]

I just wanted to post my work here to see if anyone had any thoughts, comments or ideas on things to expand on. I'm also posting with the hopes it will keep me motivated and encouraged to improve my skills and try new and more difficult tasks.

[Crow]

Hey cemitten.

Novel project. To be clear is your data yrs actually served under contract on that team, remaining years or total yrs contracted regardless of whether served or yet served?

An interesting extension might be looking at avg. survivability after gm change (and splits by length of deal and salary). Or correlate your data with gm tenure. Or win percentage or playoff advancement.

[sndesai1]

maybe weight the time under contract by minutes played and plot it over time to see how long team "cores" tend to stay together

as it is, it seems like every team ends up around 2 because mediocre and below average players switch teams quite often. how long end of bench players have been on a team doesn't really seem to provide any valuable information