Happy F5 Season, everyone! Today’s newsletter brings us a refreshing Q&A with ESPN’s Kevin Pelton, a.k.a The Machine. After that, I have some charts on the hidden cost of injuries and absences. On Friday, I’ll be sharing the code I used to create the charts in the second half of this newsletter.
I often hear criticism that people who rely on analytics don’t actually watch the games. But from what I can tell, that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve found that the more analytically inclined someone is the more they obsess about watching basketball.
Take Kevin Pelton, for example.
Pelton’s on time for the first Vegas Summer League game of the day and stays in his seat at the Thomas and Mack Center till the last game of the day. He rarely, if ever, enters the smaller Cox Pavilion.
Most people know Pelton from his writing on ESPN and his frequent appearances on the Lowe Post, Hoop Collective, and the Dunc’d On Podcast. Before joining ESPN, Pelton wrote for BasketballProspectus.com and served as a consultant for the Indiana Pacers. Early in his career, he was a beat writer for his hometown Seattle Supersonics and Storm.
I’ve known Pelton for a few years and I can tell you he’s as kind as he is smart. If you find yourself at a dinner with him, encourage him to order for the table. He makes good decisions.
I talked to Pelton about the Pacific Northwest, podcasting, and putting the kibosh on lengthy reviews.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
F5: When you graduated college, did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to do with your life? I’m reading through your ESPN bio and its like, “damn, this guy was born to cover basketball.”
KP: I'm not big on visualization, but my senior year at the University of Washington, a professor had us visualize our ideal career and I pretty much imagined what I'm doing now.
At the time, I thought of it as Rob Neyer for basketball. When I started college, sports writing seemed unrealistic. I didn't know anyone in the industry and hadn't done any journalism, even for the school paper. I was fortunate to be in the perfect place at the perfect time both as the Internet created new opportunities and lowered the barriers to entry as well as for the growth of statistical analysis.
By the time I graduated, I'd developed relationships with the pioneers of the industry, including John Hollinger and Dean Oliver. I'd also spent the last two years interning for the Sonics and Storm websites, and while my path from there to ESPN involved a lot of lucky breaks, it felt plausible
I haven’t spent any time in the Pacific Northwest, but it has this reputation for being a huge basketball hub. As a Seattle native, can you explain why basketball is such a big deal there?
Both Seattle and Portland share having two separate runs that drew in fans: the late 1970s, when both won championships and the Finals were played in the PNW three consecutive years, and then during the 1990s that grew fanbases that are adults now. The Payton-Kemp Sonics were formative for me falling in love with basketball.
Then, it's an indoor sport in an area where it rains the entire basketball season. For Seattle specifically, I think Jamal Crawford deserves a lot of credit for nurturing future generations of NBA talent as a mentor and role model.
As a Seattle guy, I’d guess you’re in favor of expansion. But expansion would dilute the league's talent pool and make for a worse overall product at least in the short run. I’m not sure thats a good thing given where were at in terms of fan interest in the NBA at the moment. What say you?
Setting aside my bias, I think the size of the NBA talent pool supports expansion. I wrote about this topic a decade ago and found that based on the influx of international talent, the NBA would need to add eight teams to have an equivalent pool per team to the 1980s and 1990s.
Back then, you could argue that international growth had produced many role players but not many superstars. Now, as we likely head toward what will almost certainly be the seventh consecutive season with a non-American MVP, that seems laughable in retrospect. We have seen rosters increase in the last decade with the addition of two-way contracts, but those get us to a point in the talent distribution where there's a huge number of interchangeable players -- surely many more than expansion would add.
Anytime a trade happens I always go straight to your trade grades to see what you’ve written. How the hell do you write them so fast?
In some ways, writing grades is easier because there's no time to torture over research or every sentence. That makes it easier to get in a flow state and put my thoughts down quickly. The tricky part is when something comes out of nowhere and I have to start conceiving of a new roster from scratch. Damian Lillard landing in Milwaukee was a good example of that where I didn't turn things around as quickly as I would have liked.
What kinds of things, if any, do you hear from front offices after you release your grades?
I probably get less feedback than you'd think. Maybe if I have a good friend with the team, but everybody's busy during the usual transaction windows so those conversations tend to happen after the fact. I have occasionally heard second-hand grumbling from executives unhappy with the grades, but that's pretty rare.
I was reading one of your recent articles on ESPN titled "Best fits on NBA contenders for 10 key players." The Lakers were suggested for 7 of those 10 key players. Do you feel pressure -- either internally from ESPN or externally from readers -- to mention the Lakers and other big market teams in your writing?
I honestly don't. My BlueSky thread on how deadline trades are more likely to help average teams than elite ones was a not-so-subtle pushback to that response. The Lakers have a unique combination of abundant needs, urgency to win, available draft picks and tradeable contracts that make them a plausible fit for just about everyone. But that was equally true of LeBron's time in Cleveland, when the Cavaliers made an unusually high number of in-season trades for a contender.
At some point in the last 5-10 years every writer also had to become a podcaster. Has that been an easy evolution for you?
Depends who on r/BillSimmons you ask!
One of the things I like about podcasting is that my writing can admittedly be pretty dry, despite having editors that encourage me to show more personality. And that's easier to do in the less formal setting of a podcast. The challenge is to convey statistics without the ability to rely on tables or charts (sorry, Kevin Durant, I enjoy them in a hoop discussion). It's probably still a little easier for me to organize my thoughts in written form than in a podcast, but I enjoy doing both.
If I were an ESPN exec I’d give you and Dean Oliver a podcast and call it Dean and The Machine and watch the big bucks roll in. If not Dean, who would be your dream podcast partner?
I believe I caught "Dean and the Machine" on the festival circuit. Good beat, you can dance to it.
My favorite podcasts typically tend to have two friends (or, in the case of the Seattle sports podcast I co-host, brothers) who have similar interests but different perspectives so listeners can relate to one or the other depending on the situation. With that in mind, I'd love to team up with a player who's skeptical of analytics but willing to entertain the ideas. Maybe it's Durant and we steal the CBS sitcom to title it "Kevin Can Wait"?
What are your NBA blind spots and/or biases? For me, I overrate three-point gunners — guys who just chuck the hell out of it. What about you?
Despite the premium my metrics put on shooting, I've always had a soft spot for middling shooters who are active defensively and stuff the box score with rebounds, steals and blocks.
Conveniently, two of the most prominent recent examples are the son of the greatest Sonics player of all time (Gary Payton II) and a UW product (Matisse Thybulle). Maybe it's a good thing the Blazers only had the two of them on the same roster for a few hours at the 2022 trade deadline, because otherwise I might have had to move to Portland.
Adam Silver comes to you and grants you the unilateral ability to make one rule change. What do you do?
I fully endorse what Silver mentioned to Dan Patrick about awarding two free throws when a player is fouled shooting a 3 outside the last two minutes. It's possible that could lead to more dangerous closeouts, but defenders would still have to avoid a flagrant foul for getting in the shooter's landing spots, and the expected value of two free throws will almost always exceed the same player shooting a wide-open 3.
That said, if you give me one rule change, I'm limiting reviews to a maximum of 30 seconds. The longer a review goes, the more the returns diminish in terms of improving the call on the court.
Whens the last time you changed your mind about something NBA-related?
I was skeptical Russell Westbrook's fit with the Denver Nuggets' starting five was more than small sample size, but I've bought into the synergy between his rediscovered willingness to cut and Nikola Jokic's playmaking. There's also something to Westbrook's ability to outrun opponents in transition, particularly at altitude. I still have some questions about how it will work in the playoffs, when opponents will be cognizant of Westbrook off-ball and equally rested, but there's no doubt now that adding Westbrook has helped Denver stay in position for home-court advantage in the first round.
You cover the NBA and WNBA. I know you also follow football, baseball, and hockey pretty closely as fan. Meanwhile, my girlfriend nearly killed me when I told her I was going to start following the EPL a couple years ago. How do you balance your personal relationships with your wide interest in sports?
Very carefully!
Other than the NFL, I'd say my non-basketball viewing tends Seattle-specific, and it's often a matter of just having those games streaming in the background during NBA game nights to keep an eye on them. But the fact that the Mariners are playing again and the football season are certainly a source of frustration.
You were one of the first people I know that completely cut ties with Twitter and went fully over to BlueSky. What’s been your experience there?
Admittedly, BlueSky was pretty quiet during the first year I was there. I was mostly posting links without a lot of the dialogue I enjoyed about the peak era of NBA Twitter. It's been nice to see so many people join over the last three months. Now I get about as much constructive interaction on BlueSky as I did before I left Twitter. And it's nice to have an equivalent (DeckBlue) to TweetDeck to see multiple columns (and accounts) at the same time.
Is there anything in your life you’re intentionally not analytical about? Maybe it’s when you’re deciding which restaurant to go to. Or what movie to watch. In other words, when, if ever, do you just go off vibes?
I mean you're talking to someone who has a spreadsheet rating the beers I drink and recorded an hour-long pod with Nate Duncan about fast food. It's pretty analytical across the board. I might say the most vibes-based I get is company for a good meal. That's an art and not a science.
What's one thing you can't live without during the NBA season?
The Daily Duncs from Dan Feldman, which are free to non-Dunc'd On subscribers twice a week.
Aggregation is a four-letter word among NBA media, and understandably so. Much of what passes for aggregation is an attempt to take reports out of context to maximize clickability, which often distorts what was actually being said. But the Internet is a big place and there's a need for aggregation to point us to stories we might have missed.
Henry Abbott's links at TrueHoop -- a huge driver of modern NBA discussion -- and HoopsHype are aggregation, too. And the best aggregation adds context instead of subtracting it. Dan excels at that, bringing original research and trivia to links that direct readers to the source by highlighting why stories are worth reading instead of trying to steal their pageviews.
DNDinero
Humans are good at counting things they can see. Points, assists, rebounds, etc…
But it’s the things we can’t see that often are most illuminating. For example, games missed due to injuries.
Most websites don’t even bother tracking games missed. Spotrac purports to, but the data isn’t updated regularly or it’s just straight up wrong. For example, Spotrac has Joel Embiid with 30 games missed this season. He’s actually missed 35 as of this writing.
So, instead of relying on someone else’s counting, I dove into the raw data myself.
Every NBA box score has a section dedicated to who didn’t play and why. That’s important because sometimes we want to know the difference between a player that misses a game because he was injured (DND - Injury/Illness) or because he sucks (DNP-Coach’s Decision).
I ran through every box score from this season to find out how many games every player has missed due to injuries or absences, like in Jimmy Butler’s case. Then, I combined that information with player salary data to get a rough estimate of the cost of each team’s various injuries and absences.
The chart above shows the total amount of player salary each team has spent on injuries and absences. To calculate this, I divided every player’s annual salary by 82 (the total amount of regular season games) and multiplied it by their total games missed. Add all those values up for each team and bing bang boom.
The New Orleans Pelicans are by far the biggest spenders on injuries. Zion Williamson (16 million over 36 games missed) and Brandon Ingram (14 million over 32 games missed) alone have cost the Pelicans more than $30 million in injuries. Add the cost of the injuries to Herb Jones, Dejounte Murray, and CJ McCollum and it’s no wonder they’ve spent more than $50 Million worth of player salary on injuries.
It’s a minor miracle that the Los Angeles Clippers are 9th in Net Rating despite not having their best and most expensive player for the vast majority of the season. Before the season I thought they might trade Kawhi Leonard at the deadline if he came back and looked healthy. Now, they’re too good to trade him and the better question is who will they might trade for.
Contrast the Clippers with the Philadelphia 76ers who are in the midst of the season from hell. Joe Embiid’s knees are cooked. Paul George is having his least efficient scoring season as pro. Tyrese Maxey can’t do it alone. Still, 76ers fans can take solace in the fact that the second half the season should be more forgiving as opposing teams begin to rev up their tank engines.
The Detroit Pistons are one of the league’s best surprise teams. But they’ve also been surprisingly healthy — Jaden Ivey’s leg injury not withstanding. Their fans are happy they’re suddenly winning. Meanwhile, their front office is smiling through clenched teeth. That’s because their 2025 first round pick is top 13 protected and if the season ended today it would be 16th.
No one is rooting for the Pistons more this season than the Minnesota Timberwolves who own Detroit’s 2025 first round pick. The Timberwolves have up until recently been the recipient of extraordinary good injury luck. But Donte DiVincenzo has missed the last ten games with a toe injury. And now Julius Randle is day-to-day with a groin injury. The Timberwolves have been an up and down team despite having great health luck. What will they be if they start having bad health luck?
A little late to this, and I'm sorry--I'm going to have to take shots at Pelton here. I once saw him tweet about his linear regression model trying to explain to fans why some of his variables were significant one year but not the next--and I lost all respect for him when I realised he didn't have any basic conception of what's cross-validating your model and what's real or not