Raptors

[Crow]

Lowry and Ibaka re-signed, Patterson walks, Carroll- pay with picks to move. Typical but not really culture change. More like calcification. Huge price big 3 (4 if JVal stays). Same style, no reason to expect better results, at least yet.

[Nathan]

I personally don't think the Raptors have a great chance to win the East, let alone the championship, but I'm surprised they don't have more proponents. They had the best scoring margin in the East last year and, at first glance, they had a successful offseason by retaining their stars.

A closer look reveals that they lost key rotation players in Tucker, Carrol, and Patterson. And of course they've utterly botched the development of Nogueira. Defense looks too shoddy now to contend.

[jgoldstein34]

The Miles signing will help a lot, he's a really great player. I'm pretty confident they'll still be a top 3 East team.

[Dr Positivity]

Ujiri makes a huge bet on Ibaka being better than Patterson in a way not close to what RAPM/RPM says. End up losing 2 1sts, a 2nd and Ross between the original trade and the Carroll dump that was forced by Ibaka putting them in lux tax. Just to get Ibaka over Patterson despite RAPM/RPM easily favoring the latter. Reminds me of when Sam Presti flipped the switch from the "collect draft picks, spend wisely" team to "trade draft picks and cap out to win while Durant is here" mode... but the additions he went for it with were Kanter and Waiters

I only really see one road to contention for the Raptors in the next 3 years. If one of their young players in Poeltl, Siakam, Wright, VanVleet, Bruno, Anunoby becomes as star level player. Basically they own a whole bunch of scratch tickets and are hoping to hit jackpot

edit - Oops, I forgot Powell

[Crow]

If "star" means top 50 player, my quick take is almost no chance any of those guys achieve that. Top 100, still unlikely.

[JoshEngleman]

This one is easy. They're still a good team. They have no chance to beat the Cavs. They're basically guaranteed to be in the playoffs for the next two years, so they might as well just keeping chugging along. There's value in the organization simply being solid.

[Crow]

Thanks for all the charts. Minute allocations generally look good. Only mentioning quibbles, alternatives elsewhere.

[jgoldstein34]

Curious for your win projections thus far Josh, do they all exist in the same world or is each unique to the team? I.e. will adding each team's win together equal 1230 or not. Given that the East is especially easy and the West especially hard, could shift each team one way or the other.

[Crow]

Who is most responsible for Raptors cultural issues? Huge playoff dropoffs for DeRozan and Lowry and most everybody else except Wright & Poetl. It is the player's fault but I'd assign a lot of blame for not stopping it / fixing it on Coach, GM & front office crew.

[jgoldstein34]

It's DeRozan's fault, the team has been better with him off the court for each of the past 5 seasons and only once in his career have they been better while he played. He's a fine regular season player, his play style and absolute lack of D and shooting kill the team come playoffs.

[Crow]

So Casey & DeRozan created a monster or slept while a monster was created.

Seems like a lot of Coaches & GMs groove on "Stars" that get talked about. "I found or created a Star!!!" Over actual impact or RPM estimates of said. Owners bear culpability or responsibility for allowing this.

[JoshEngleman]

Curious for your win projections thus far Josh, do they all exist in the same world or is each unique to the team? I.e. will adding each team's win together equal 1230 or not. Given that the East is especially easy and the West especially hard, could shift each team one way or the other.

These are all in a vacuum projections, so it likely wouldn't add to 1230, but it would be pretty close. When I'm finished with every team, I'll total them all up to check. From there, I could just use an implied win pct. and sim the season. Each year of my projections are ultimately balanced, so the raw average of every guy's rating should be really, really close to .1.

[JoshEngleman]

Thanks for all the charts. Minute allocations generally look good. Only mentioning quibbles, alternatives elsewhere.

Thanks. The specifics for each position are purely cosmetic, which is probably obvious. I'm doing them all by hand and using BR for each guy's individual position %s, so they should generally look correct. If there's something that looks really weird, it's probably a typo.

[jgoldstein34]

So Casey & DeRozan created a monster or slept while a monster was created.

Seems like a lot of Coaches & GMs groove on "Stars" that get talked about. "I found or created a Star!!!" Over actual impact or RPM estimates of said. Owners bear culpability or responsibility for allowing this.

Bit of both, remember this entire Raptors team was a mistake. They were supposed to be rebuilding and just ended up being really good after trading Rudy Gay.