Analysis: Youth vs Experience

[emplep7]

I know its early in the season, but I decided to look at the general makeup of the league since everyone is OBSESSED with youth it seems and see if it has translated to early season success this year. This will just essentially be a numbers based exercise, but all I did was plot the average age of each teams whole roster and starting 5 against their winning percentage.

Average Age of Team vs Winning Percentage



Analysis: So while this can be slightly misleading, there does seem to be a trend early on in the season with a certain age range and winning %. Granted there are outliers (Boston and Miami), but for the most part it seems that teams with an average roster age between 25 and 26 seem to have the most success so far. This is interesting because most people have though that players enter their prime in the game at 28, so could we be bucking the trend? Or are we so obsessed with youth that this is the environment we have created? Let see what the starting 5 data says...

Average Age of Starting Five vs Winning Percentage



Analysis: Now its hit or miss because there are some teams that are playing awful right now, but it seems like the trend moves upward for the starting 5 (and is more broad). The data suggests that while having a younger team makeup overall seems to be working so far this season, your starting 5 should actually fall in the 25-28 range, with the most success in the 27 to 28 range. Again, its early and as we gather more data this could show the true value of age vs experience.

Below is the raw data that I used for these plots in case anyone cared:



Again, Its very early and it will be interesting to follow up on this later in the season, but let me know what you think about the age old question around going young or getting experienced vets to bring you a ring.

[Ocons]

Awesome, don't have time to dig into the correlation yet but I had a similar idea for an article. Glad you were able to do it. Nice work.

[Cleasby]

You could do an analysis over the past 5 years. Then it would be interesting to see the trend.

Still so early this year.

[andrei]

Interesting analysis. If you add a trendline Jon what will it show? Just looking at the graphs I don't see a relationship between age and winning but perhaps a trendline can be useful to see if its gonna go up along with age.

Quite early too as you said

[hardenwithnod]

I think later on this study will probably reflect a much better spectrum in this debate, as right now the sample size is still quite small. Can't wait to see this get updated at the all star break or so.

[KW]

I think this would be great to see for past seasons. 10 games isn't a great sample size.

I think experience really comes out in the playoffs though that'll be tougher to measure

[emplep7]

Interesting analysis. If you add a trendline Jon what will it show? Just looking at the graphs I don't see a relationship between age and winning but perhaps a trendline can be useful to see if its gonna go up along with age.

Quite early too as you said

I was mainly looking at the peaks/valleys this early on since there is limited data (win %), but that's definitely something I can add later on in the year to see if we can find an actual correlation.

[emplep7]

I think this would be great to see for past seasons. 10 games isn't a great sample size.

I think experience really comes out in the playoffs though that'll be tougher to measure

Yeah past seasons would be good to look at, but............not it. That requires a little more digging through old files and time than I have right now.

[OneNole]

Nice idea. If I was to write this my hypothesis would be that age doesnt matter except for endurance level. My belief is that if you have a 21 year old player and a 31 year old player with the exact same ratings and simmed a season 5 times you would be able to average out the same exact results.

I also think prime in dds is 24/25. Players are typically done progressing at that age

I think the biggest reason teams discount a players age so much is that they dont feel comfortable going after it. They are content on being good but wont take the necessary steps to become great. Too many seem fine with being good for 5 or 6 seasons as opposed to being great for 3

[mgtr81]

Very nice idea Jon, despite being too early. We can probably revisit this when at least 30 or so games are played. My first thought is that age and wins should correlate positively.

[GreenBear]

Great idea for an article. As has been mentioned, it's far too small of a sample size to draw any conclusions really, but this is something worth revisiting at the end of the season.

[Dennis]

I think wins don't correlate to age but it shows for how long a team will stay relevant. Exception is the endurance boost obviously. Maybe it's better to use also the average experience as year 3 should have a significant impact. Anyhow, it's good to see that we are one of the youngest teams in the league. If we would go by top12 I think we would even be the youngest as Warren and Amir Johnson up the average a lot for us but don't see any minutes atm

[Flaming Homer]

Very good statistic which is worse to keep up.
If not too many teams change in favor of the tank during the season, the statistic in the off season would be very interesting.
Separated in regular and playoffs maybe.

In general I think it is correct that it mostly means how long you can keep a core together. Only the experience has IMO some influence, I would expect players with higher experience to be more steady ... but no proof for that.