2011-12 Season Overview

Alright, so this is how this is going to work. The entire 2011-2012 NBA season will be simulated using rosters that I've developed to determine the 12 best players in each franchise's history. There's a few things that should be noted about how the rosters were made up:



1. Players could only qualify for one team. Whichever team a player had the highest score for using the Greatness Equation, that's the team that gets to use him. (I'll recycle an old joke from last year: "No one wants to watch Wilt Chamberlain play with himself.")
2. A slight caveat to #1 - a player can go to his second highest team if his first highest team already has its 12 roster spots filled. For example, let's just say, hypothetically, that Ray Allen scored highest for the Boston Celtics. (He didn't, but just go with me here.) Yet, he still didn't score high enough to be in the Celtics top 12. In that case, he could go to either the Bucks or the Thunder/Sonics - whichever one he had a higher score for (assuming either of those teams had room for him and his score with those teams was in their top 12.)
3. For the ABA teams (Nuggets, Pacers, Nets, and Spurs), the accomplishments of their players during the ABA years count as 40% in determining their final score.


Finally, when developing the rosters, I was going to just let WhatIfSports divvy up the minutes however it wanted. But it became apparent pretty early on that WIS sucks at doing that: it ended up just splitting minutes evenly at every position. For example, Jerry Sloan started over Michael Jordan and they each got about 24 minutes at shooting guard. Also, Larry Bird averaged about nine minutes a game when I let WIS do it on its own. So, I decided to take matters into my own hands.


I came up with the starting lineups, based mostly on WIS values for the players individual years. (WIS assigns a player a "salary" for every year of their career - the higher the salary, the better the year.) Since I was using those values anyway to pick which year of the player's career was going onto the roster, I decided to use them to determine the starting lineups as well. Basically, I just took the best point guard, best two wings (SG and SF), and best two big men (PF and C). There were a few extreme circumstances where this didn't quite work, but you'll see those in the upcoming days when I preview the divisions.