NBA All Average Team

This project focuses on the idea of a statistically average NBA Team. The idea stems from the NBA naming All-NBA teams every year. Especially with lots of teams employing the tanking strategy (notably the 76ers in the mid-2010s and the 76ers during the “Trust the Process” phase in the 2010s), we were hoping to see if a statistically average NBA would be competitive against some of these teams. To do this, we took a players per game stats and then scale them between 0 and 1 in comparison to other players in the league. We then summed all of these scaled scores into 1 total that we called SScD (Sum of Scaled Differences). The interpretation being that that the lower a player’s SScD is, the more average they were. We also did the opposite of this idea, seeing who the least average players were. Due to minute restrictions that we placed, this turned into a psuedo-all star team. When then compared the All-Average Team to the league worst Golden State Warriors and the All-Non-Average Team to the NBA Champions Toronto Raptors.

Link to Poster

Link to Slides