yeah ok guys I'm a basketball stats newbie. Message received on PER, it was just what was handy. I can re-do the numbers vs remaining contenders - sounds like
PIPM is built off of RAPM and improves on BPM (indeed, starts from it), so while I wish I had more of a player-tracking-based metric, we can certainly use that (and its defensive component, D-PIPM) to look at these groupings a bit better.
And I've got some questions posed here that I owe answers to, will get to that. e.g.
Aren't we missing Marvin Williams in this bench analysis?
These are all subjective attempts to look at who would get promoted to a playoff rotation spot if given an injury, on the assumption that most playoff teams only rotate 6 non-bigs. So just to take Milwaukee as a specific example of how I looked at things:
1. First step is, who's a starter? Milwaukee has only 6 players with >10 starts, Giannis Middleton Bledsoe Lopez Matthews was the very-consistent starting lineup, with DiVincenzo getting 24 starts. Ilyasova got 8 starts but those were very intermittent, may have been load-management days, and none since resumption in the bubble.
2. Next, let's pull out the bigs, since those aren't relevant to comparing teams' readiness to sustain an injury like ours to Hayward. Looking at the Play-by-Play table in Bk-Ref, both Lopez-es were 100% C, DJ Wilson was 38% C, and Giannis 24% C. So we're going to only exclude players named Lopez.
3. Then let's look at minutes-played and see if we can get some clarity on the top 5 or 6 non-bigs. Giannis Middleton Bledsoe Matthews have remained healthy and starting all season and into the playoffs, so they're the top 4. SG DiVincenzo (#5) and PG George Hill were right after them in both minutes and MPG, but Connaughton was pretty close to Hill in both regular-season and playoff usage, so I'm giving it to Hill partly on that edge but partly on his better On-Off +/- , and the fact that he's the #2 PG (behind Bledsoe) while Connaughton is the #3 SG (behind Matthews and DiVincenzo). So that puts Hill #6 and Connaughton #7.
4. As we get into the deeper bench, I'm looking partly at the game logs to see if they got consistent (but low) bubble minutes and even some playoff minutes, in judging the #7-9 vs "not really playing at all" edge cases. In Milwaukee's case, there was a pretty easy line to draw between the next two non-bigs and those after, just on total minutes played. Ilyasova (986) and Korver (960) both got ~16 mpg. Korver's gotten 76 playoff minutes and Ilyasova 23. Korver played every single bubble and playoff game, so we're calling him #8. Ilyasova missed only a few with a day-to-day
elbow injury, so they both appear to be trusted for the back-of-rotation roles.
5. Complicating this, to your question, is PF
Marvin Williams, who was bought out from Charlotte and signed for the vet min at the deadline (so he only got 321 minutes for the Bucks, but did so with 18.9 MPG). Position-wise, he's competing for backup PF (behind Giannis) mostly with Ilyasova. He's gotten more playoff minutes than Ilyasova. But looking at the totality of the post-trade-deadline game log, where their DNP counts are very comparable (5 vs 6), Williams has played 18 MPG to Ilyasova's 13 in the bubble, but a big chunk of that may have been largely attributed to Ilyasova's elbow situation. Looking at the fullness of their seasons, since they appear to be very comparable now, I have to give Ilyasova the edge for that #9 spot mostly due to the season-long role he's had including occasional starting duty. If Williams keeps on getting a much bigger playoff role vs Miami, then maybe he takes that spot. Either way, we're talking about end-of-rotation kind of guys here.
6. Everyone else, e.g.
Sterling Brown, got only spot duty in the bubble and got limited minutes, or were depth signings not counted on for anything, such as Frank Mason (two-way contract) or Thanasis Antetokounmpo.
That's kinda the way I went through each team. When in doubt, I mostly focused on minutes totals (both regular season and post), and if they were close I looked at game logs and tried to see who had the bigger role post-deadline and post-restart. Some decisions, such as the above, will be arguable. But I don't think it really changes the analysis.