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akhan786Projecting Team USA’s 2016 roster
History gives us hints on what the U.S. roster will look like at next Olympics
Originally Published: August 2, 2012By Neil Paine | Basketball-Reference.com
(Photo by David Becker/Getty ImagesHow different will Team USA’s roster look in the 2016 Olympics?It’s hard enough making predictions about this year, but try this one on for size — which players are most likely to be on the U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team four years from now, in 2016?
For our educated guess, let’s take a look at some historical trends that extend back to the first professional U.S. Olympic team in 1992. Building a model focused on predicting the next national team’s roster strictly from knowledge available at the time of the previous Olympics, several factors emerged that deserve serious consideration.
The first, and most important, is age. On average, members of the current Olympic team who had any NBA experience in 2008 were just 23.5 years old at the time. And that figure is pretty much par for the course — since 1992, the average Dream Teamer who had played in the NBA four years prior was 23.8 years old at the time. (If you eliminate the vet-laden 1996 team from the sample, the average drops to 23.2.)
As a general rule of thumb, for every year older that a player is four seasons before the Olympics, he’s 8 percent less likely to be on the next Olympic team, even after holding performance equal. This is because older players are at a much greater risk to decline, or suffer an injury that prevents them from being a world-class player in the future. Four years is a long time by the standards of a professional athlete, and a lot of things can happen in that span — many of them negative, unfortunately.
Another key factor in predicting whether a player will be on the Olympic roster is his minutes per game in the NBA season four years prior. The Olympic committee does not tend to select players who have not already been established for years as significant contributors to their teams. Since 1992, the average member of Team USA had logged 36.4 mpg four seasons prior to the Olympics, a number that has grown to 37.5 for veteran members of the current team.
Of course, performance also matters. There are many ways to measure it statistically, but the most predictive metrics of the Dream Team era are Daniel Myers’ Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) and a three-year running total of John Hollinger’s Estimated Wins Added (EWA). This factor is especially important for veterans — as they get older, a high level of production becomes more and more important to offset the detrimental effect of aging on their Olympic probability. For instance, to keep his probability of playing in 2016 at the same level as it was at age 32, a 33-year-old like Kobe Bryant would need to produce about 10 percent more VORP and EWA.
Advanced statistics aren’t the only performance measures that aid in the predictive process. Subjective awards such as all-defensive and all-rookie selections are also quite helpful in vetting potential candidates for the 2016 Olympic team. The committee seems to favor players who were named to the all-defensive squad at any point between four and six seasons prior to the Olympics in question, with more weight being placed on selections further in the past. (It’s also possible elite players peak earlier on defense, at least in the eyes of voters.)
All-rookie team nods are especially important when predicting the next Olympic team, with the committee apparently focusing specifically on selections from four years before the Games. Since 1996, 29 percent of all veteran Team USA members were named to the all-rookie team exactly four years prior to the Olympics. Along with age and playing time, the all-rookie effect was one of the most significant trends for predicting Olympic rosters since 1992.
The final factor is a wild card that might (or might not) apply to the game’s best player in 2016. Over the entirety of the 1992-2008 period, there is a statistically significant "MVP effect," wherein the winner of multiple NBA MVP awards in the seasons leading up to an Olympic year is significantly less likely to be on the U.S. team four years down the road. The underlying theory is that a player of that stature would be more likely to decide he had nothing left to prove, and decline an invitation to the next Olympics.
Does this mean we won’t be seeing LeBron James in 2016, then? Maybe — but probably not. While the effect was technically significant over the full data set since 1992, it can be attributed mostly to Michael Jordan’s absence from the 1996 games. Without considering MVPs, Jordan was so overwhelmingly likely to play for Team USA in Atlanta that the regression model needed to create a variable to explain his omission. Tim Duncan’s absence in 2008 also feeds the effect, but if you limit the model to analyze 1996-2008 instead, there is no significance to the MVP variable.
At any rate, we can use this model of past Olympic selections to inform our best guess about the 2016 team. Based on the past, I’d say about eight of the team’s 12 players will have been active during the 2011-12 season, and here’s where the model sees them in terms of certainty that they’ll be on the 2016 roster:
[+] Enlarge
Douglas Jones/US PresswireHoward is a likely candidate to make Team USA in 2016.Very likely
Kevin Durant, SF, 27 years old (at time of 2016 games)
Kyrie Irving, PG, 23
Dwight Howard, C, 30
Chris Paul, PG, 30
Kevin Love, PF, 27
Russell Westbrook, PG, 27
Blake Griffin, PF, 26Somewhat likely
LeBron James, SF, 31
Derrick Rose, PG, 27
Kawhi Leonard, SF, 24
Greg Monroe, C, 25
James Harden, SG, 26
Paul George, SG, 25According to the model, some combination of those players (with DeMarcus Cousins and John Wall also having an outside chance) will probably make up the veteran core of the U.S. team in Rio de Janeiro four years from now. This means the following veteran players are likely to drop off of the team between now and then:
Carmelo Anthony, SF, 31 (in 2016)
Kobe Bryant, SG, 37
Tyson Chandler, C, 33
Andre Iguodala, SF, 32
Deron Williams, PG, 31And then there’s the matter of non-veteran players. Anthony Davis seems quite likely to make the team again in 2016, although we’ve never seen him in NBA action (and, again, a lot can happen in four years). In an average year, about four of the 12 players on Team USA’s roster were not in the NBA four years before, and the best place to look for them is the high school classes of four-to-six years prior to the Olympics in question.
According to the ESPN 100, the top two players in the classes of 2010, 2011, and 2012 were:
2012:
No. 1 Nerlens Noel, C
No. 2 Shabazz Muhammad, SF2011:
No. 1 Anthony Davis, PF
No. 2 Andre Drummond, C2010:
No. 1 Harrison Barnes, SF
No. 2 Jared Sullinger, PFOf course, this look at past recruiting rankings only serves to illustrate the difficulty in projecting four years into the future. While Howard was the No. 1 prospect in 2004 and Love was rated No. 2 in 2007, not every Team USA newcomer was ranked so highly. According to the Recruiting Services Consensus Index, Paul was eighth in 2003, Harden was 18th in 2007, Deron Williams was 49th in 2002 and Westbrook ranked a staggering 114th in 2006. Meanwhile, it’s 2012 and you can already see the shine coming off of 2010’s top two recruits, Barnes and Sullinger.
Which is to say, none of this is an exact science. But thanks to some analysis of historical trends, we can make a fairly educated guess at what the 2016 Olympics roster will look like.
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