“It’s hard not to be romantic about baseball.”
“There are rich teams and poor teams, and then there’s 50 feet of crap, and then there’s us.”
With quotes like these, and the acting expertise of Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Chris Pratt and numerous others, the film “Moneyball” manages to engage the general public for two hours and 13 minutes with advanced baseball statistics that even the most fervent baseball fans would not go near with a ten-foot pole. In the time since that 2002 season, and the 2003 source material for the film, MLB sabermetrics have become standard practice for front offices around the league. Other leagues have implemented these statistical practices as well, but less visibly, especially to the casual viewer. Maybe this has to do with the lack of a hard salary cap in the MLB, or stingy owners, or teams being more market-dependent when it comes to spending. Or maybe it is simply a perception. Either way, another league with teams that just cannot seem to get out of the gutter of the league is the NBA, with the shining example being the Detroit Pistons, coming off one of the worst statistical seasons of all time. Can struggling teams like this use similar tactics to those of the 2002 Oakland Athletics to compete on a budget? I decided to conduct a similar study to attempt to find hope. Without any further ado, if the Detroit Pistons want to win the 2024-2025 NBA Championship, this is the roster I think could do it:
PG: Payton Pritchard
SG: Cam Thomas
SF: Jalen Johnson
PF: Jalen Williams
And coming off the bench:
SF: Franz Wagner
PF: Jonathan Kuminga
SG: Josh Giddey
C/PF: Daniel Gafford
Three-to-five young players who will not see the court in any game without a point differential of 30-plus.
There it is. Convinced? Ready to buy season tickets? No? Really? Would it help if I told you this team does not have a single top-five pick over the past five years, an all star over the past three, or anyone who played less than 22 minutes per game last season? What if I told you this team’s salary comes in at just around $75 million, over $50 million less than this year’s Pistons? Still a no? Let’s dig into it.
The first challenge was to find an appropriate “single number,” that is, a singular metric to display a player’s value to a team winning. The best measure available is Player Efficiency Rating or PER, which essentially takes into account everything a player does to influence team success, and then standardizes it so the league average is 15 on any given season. But how can a league-winning level of PER be quantified? The 2023-24 NBA Champion Boston Celtics had an average team PER of 17.2, when weighted by minutes played. In theory, a team with a higher weighted PER should be able to win the NBA championship. In order to keep the payroll as low as possible, I came to a final measure of a player’s value to a team being 2023-24 PER divided by 2024-25 salary. The above ten players were the league leaders, after accounting for minutes played. Among them are some young stars who were overlooked in the elite portion of the draft after underwhelming college careers, or because they played overseas. Others, namely Pritchard and Thomas, have drawn criticism for being undersized. Others have one or two weak aspects of their game that turned away scouts. Now, I can acknowledge that some of these players were in fact selected pretty highly. However, for a team that has been struggling as much as the Pistons have, every year brings an expected top-ten draft selection. If these concerns really turn you away, there are no less than ten other players with whom this experiment would have still worked.
The NBA will forever be a league dominated by its superstars. They bring fans into the stadium, make highlight plays, sell jerseys and command the most exorbitant salaries. On the other hand, winning basketball does not necessarily need to come as a result of high spending. A small-market team driven by analytics and players who influence team success more than their better-compensated counterparts should be able to take on the rest of the league. The ultimate question: is there any way this actually works? While I cannot provide a definitive answer either way, it sure seems like teams like the Pistons do not have all that much to lose by trying.
