Which NBA Teams Added The Most Wins Above Replacement In 2019?

Believe it or not, it's been less than a month since the 2019 NBA Draft. I wouldn't blame you for not realizing that. The league has been flipped upside down in the few weeks since then.

Here are just a few of the players who will be on different teams next season:

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Counting everyone would be a nightmarish task. Long story short, most teams will showcase significant changes next season.

The Denver Nuggets, Orlando Magic, San Antonio Spurs and Detroit Pistons probably came the closest to "standing pat," but they all, at the very least, added new rotation players.

Some of the overhauled squads are obvious winners. It doesn't take a ton of analysis to know the Los Angeles Clippers got better. Keeping most of a solid team intact and adding Leonard and George will do that.

Others may not have moved the needle as much as some think, at least not according to FiveThirtyEight's CARMELO projections system.

The model forecasts year-by-year wins above replacement for each of the NBA's players through 2026. And if you look up the 2019-20 numbers for all of this summer's additions and subtractions, you can start to get a picture of who had the best offseason.

To see the individual players that combined to give us those numbers, you can peruse the spreadsheet here.

These figures are not to be confused with FiveThirtyEight's own 2019-20 team predictions. That model uses entire team rosters, injuries, playing time projections and more. The explanation of their methodology is thorough.

This is more rudimentary. It simply takes each team's net gains or losses and adds that number to last season's win total. That's why a team like the Clippers is predicted to get to almost 60 wins here but only has 48 on FiveThirtyEight's team predictions.

Predicting the NBA isn't an exact science. Even with all the data we have available, it's still largely guesswork. But these days, we at least have educated guesswork.

Now, we just have to exercise a little patience till October to see how close all the guesses are.

Unless otherwise noted, all stats courtesy of Basketball Reference or NBA.com/stats.

Source: Forbes.com

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