Anything above 53 is fantastic. 55 is my guess.
If you lose a 20PPG All-Star and think your team is only going to lose a few more games to 5 more ganes, I think you are fooling yourself. If Hayward is only worth 3-5 more wins a season then the front office made a huge mistake in giving him $120 million.
How many games a player is 'worth' becomes marginally reduced as a team gets better.
Hayward would probably be worth over 10+ wins to a bad team. But he's realistically worth closer to +5 wins to a team already as strong as the Celtics. That's not a knock on him. It's the reality that winning those extra games becomes harder.
The reason is because you are already beating the crap teams whether you have that guy or not. The extra wins have to come from the more difficult opponents. When you have only won, say 40 games, you still have a lot of wins that could have been within easy reach if you were 'just a little better'. But when you already won 50 games, then there are fewer wins within easy reach left to get.
So the marginal impact of adding a better player becomes smaller, the better your base team is.
Great post. TP
I think there is more.
This value of player adding a certain number of wins to a team is very tricky and it is a subjective. It is not measurable at all. Even further, it would fluctuate from team to team as you wrote. Lets use Hayward as an example;
- If Hayward goes to 2017/18 Atlanta team, he would (as I said, a very subjective value) add 11 wins and they would go from 24 to 35 wins.
- If he comes here, 53 win base, he adds 5 wins.
- If he goes to GSW, 67 win base, he would add just 2.
It is like GDP. Undeveloped country like Mali or Mongolia can raise its GDP much easier by 10%, than a country like Sweden or Japan could.
Attaching a single number of wins to a player is flawed in its entirety, as it resides on 2 unmeasurable variables.How much is MJ worth? I say...+16.
Would Michael Jordan add 16 wins to a 67 win team?