Projection: Playoffs a long shot for the Miami Heat

According to a popular projection model, the Miami Heat are worse than last season.

July is the month of hope for NBA fans everywhere. We look at whatever free agents our team signed and project best case scenarios. The aging vet will return to form. The journeyman with potential will finally realize it. We take the results of summer league and envision our team’s rookies and sophomores as future all-stars.

The season eventually starts and, unfortunately for some of us, we soon realize that the aging vet is, in fact, just an aging vet. The journeyman is just an average player. And the rookies have a long way to go.

This summer, the Heat lost three starters from last year’s team – icon Dwyane Wade and veterans Luol Deng and Joe Johnson. Despite the loss, Pat Riley believes the Miami Heat will compete for the playoffs this year. Is Riley’s goal realistic, or is he just summer dreaming?

To answer this question, we turn to CARMELO. No, not Carmelo Anthony. The Career-Arc Regression Model Estimator with Local Optimization. Yeah, that CARMELO. CARMELO is a system created at FiveThirtyEight.com that forecasts a player’s future performance.

According to Nate Silver, the model accurately projected wins above replacement within 1 for 55% of all players, and within 2 for 80% of all players. Wins above replacement (WAR) is a predictive statistic designed to estimate the impact of a player on the court. In short, good players should have higher WAR scores than bad players.

How well does WAR do as a stat? Well, I added the WAR for every player on a team to get the team’s WAR. The 73 win Golden State Warriors had a team WAR of 49.7. The ten win Philadelphia 76er’s had a WAR of -0.9. The two eight seeds in the playoffs, the Houston Rockets and the Detroit Pistons had WAR scores of 20.2 and 22.9 respectively.

more: Should the Heat trade for Russell Westbrook?

Last year, the Miami Heat had a team WAR of 26.5. Hassan Whiteside had the highest individual war at 5.3, followed closely by Luol Deng at 5.2. Goran Dragic and Dwyane Wade both had WAR scores of 3.5.  Justise Winslow had a WAR of 1.7, while Josh Richardson had a WAR of 1.6.

This year, CARMELO projects the Heat will have a team WAR of 16.7. Based on previous years, playoff teams have a team WAR of 20 or higher. If the projections are correct, the Heat will not make the playoffs.

What do you think? Is CARMELO right, or will the Heat beat their projections and make the playoffs?