By The Numbers: Hornets will be 11th in the Western Conference

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For simplicity’s sake, I have eliminated a few teams from this analysis. The main goal here is to project how the Western Conference “playoff bubble” will play out; therefore, I assume that last season’s top 6 seeds – the Spurs, Thunder, Lakers, Clippers, Grizzlies, and Nuggets – will all remain in the playoff picture. None of those teams lost any key pieces, and a couple of them added to their core. I also assume that the Blazers and Kings will remain at the bottom of the conference for at least one more season.

That leaves seven teams – the Hornets, Rockets, Mavericks, Suns, Jazz, Timberwolves, and Warriors – left to battle it out for the final two playoff spots. To evaluate each team based on their new rosters, I weighted each player’s PER from the prior season based on expected minutes per game (also based off of the 2011-12 season) to get a MPG-weighted total PER for each team. This concept seems simple enough, but some assumptions were required in order to keep this analysis as simple as possible.
Assumptions

* To project the PERs of this year’s rookie class, I plugged in the results from John Hollinger’s draft rater column from late June. In the case of Alexey Shved and Donatas Motiejunas, I had to create my own projections.
* If a player was injured for most or all of the 2011-12 season or simply did not play in the NBA last year, I used the PER that was projected for them by Hollinger before that season began.
* If a player’s projected PER comes in under replacement level, it will revert to replacement level. The underlying assumption here is that if a player is playing so poorly as to be under replacement level, the coach would reallocate his distribution of minutes towards players who were performing at a higher level. The replacement level PER that Hollinger provides is different for each position on the court; 11.0 for PGs, 10.5 for SGs and SFs, 11.5 for PFs, and 10.6 for Cs.
* Due to the unpredictability of injuries, none were assumed. Clearly, they will unfortunately occur, but guessing when they will happen as well as the severity is no easy task.
* Finally, the various levels of each team’s coaching staff will be ignored. Players obviously aren’t everything, but with this sort of analysis, it would be very difficult to integrate the impact of good vs. poor coaching.

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Tier 1 – Minnesota and Utah

...Tier 2 – Dallas, Golden State, and New Orleans

...The Hornets are the wild card here. The team’s back court depth is incredibly suspect, but will feature one of the strongest front courts in the league between Anderson, Davis, Lopez and Smith. Apart from Eric Gordon’s health, the biggest key for the Hornets to have a chance at making the playoffs is the progression of Austin Rivers. Greivis is a serviceable PG and will be adequate for getting Gordon and the Hornets’ big men the ball, but the team is remarkably thin at guard behind he and Gordon. If Rivers can surpass expectations for his rookie season and make a significant positive impact at the point guard position, then New Orleans has a legitimate chance to battle Minnesota and Utah for those last two playoff spots.

Tier 3 – Phoenix and Houston

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