March 30, 2012
UK vs. the NBA
Another Look

by Neil Paine

This week, former Maryland coach Gary Williams raised the question of whether the 2012 Kentucky Wildcats men's basketball team could beat the Washington Wizards right now. This is not a new idea (ESPN's Colin Cowherd noted early-90s comparisons between the Larry Johnson-era UNLV Final Four teams and bad NBA squads), but it's a consistently compelling one because it allows us to create fantasy matchups that can only happen in our imaginations.

A college team that could beat an NBA team.. On its face, the mere suggestion seems patently ridiculous. As Cowherd and Stan Van Gundy immediately pointed out, any pro-Kentucky argument focusing on their sheer number of NBA prospects needs to be tempered by the painfully obvious fact that every team in the NBA is, by definition, 100% comprised of NBA players. Simply having loads of potential NBAers isn't enough.

However, Kentucky wouldn't be bringing ordinary NBA prospects to this hypothetical matchup. Wildcats big man Anthony Davis is the number one overall pick in DraftExpress' 2012 Mock Draft, while teammate Michael Kidd-Gilchrist is ranked third. Meanwhile, forward Terrence Jones checks in at the #11 slot, and guard Doron Lamb lurks just outside the first round at #33. Based on their talent level, how much production could UK's players realistically expect to put up if they were dropped into the NBA this season?

To answer that question, let's look at recent rookies (2002-12). For every rookie who played at least 250 minutes per 82 scheduled team games, I calculated Alternate Win Score (adjusted for position and team, in the manner of Dan Rosenbaum & David Lewin in this paper), and used linear regression to retrodict it using a variety of factors (including age, draft position, and high school recruiting ranking). In the end, only one variable proved significant--their draft percentile rank, cubed:

Rookie_AWS ~ 3.345374 + 1.291682*Draft_percentrank^3

Plugging in the numbers from DraftExpress' latest mock draft, here were the numbers for Kentucky (using their playing-time distributions from both the NCAA Tournament to date and their big-time non-conference opening game vs. Kansas in November):

For the sake of context, the NBA average AWS is 5.26, so all of Kentucky's players would be below-average NBAers if forced to play this season. However, they don't have to beat an average team in our little thought experiment, just the NBA's worst.J

That means we need the odds of UK beating the Wizards (and let's throw in the Bobcats and Nets for good measure). For any game, you can calculate the probability of the home team beating the road team using the minute-weighted averages of their seasonal AWS scores:

p(hW) ~ 1 / (1 + e^(-0.486927 - 1.14971 * Diff))

Where “diff” is the home team's AWS minus the visiting team's AWS. Using that formula and their distribution of minutes played, we can calculate Charlotte's odds of beating Kentucky at home and away:

Assuming Rupp Arena would have an NBA-esque home-court advantage vs. Charlotte, the Wildcats would actually be favored at home against Charlotte, whether facing the Bobcats' horrendous opening-night lineup or the improved group they've sent out recently. (This, of course, assumes that UK's distribution of minutes would proportionally remain the same during a longer NBA game, admittedly no given.)

At any rate, here are the same numbers for the Wizards and Nets:

Washington Wizards

New Jersey Nets

Although they would be nearly on equal footing with the Bobcats (particularly Charlotte's brutal opening-night lineup), UK would struggle more against Washington, and be heavy underdogs against the Nets' current Gerald Wallace-infused lineup. Moreover, the Bobcats, Wizards, and Nets are by far the league's three worst teams according to SRS. From there, things get much tougher; against a league-average team the Wildcats would expect to win just 23.5 percent of the time, a number that becomes 8.2 percent against the league-best Chicago Bulls. According to AWS, in a 60-game home-and-home schedule vs. NBA teams, the Wildcats could expect to go 11-49 (again, assuming their playing-time distribution would stay proportional during 48-minute games).

Of course, this also means Williams was right. According to this model, at least, Kentucky would stand a chance against the NBA's worst squads. They wouldn't be favored unless facing someone like the Bobcats at home, but they theoretically could beat an NBA team if their talent is as ready for the pros as advertised.

Neil Paine is an author of Basketball Prospectus. You can contact Neil by clicking here or click here to see Neil's other articles.