New Season - New Hopes

Although I personally believe every year the Knicks have a chance to win, this year I truly do believe it. I can say gleefully that my gut reaction is that the Knicks can go .500 this year! That is truly a major step for a franchise that has done nothing right for the last 10 years. But what can we really expect from this team? To answer this question we can turn to WP48 and Wins Produced to forecast where the Knicks will finish this year. To do this forecasting I am utilizing a weighting system of 3-4-5 corresponding to the most recent year of performance outward to the last 3 years. It is not a perfect system due to injuries, coaching decisions about minutes, but still it should give a fairly good estimate of what to expect. For all rookies I am assigning 500 minutes and a WP48 of .050. This will again not be entirely accurate but will not alter the team total by that much. For this forecast I removed Eddy Curry's 2008 season of 1530 minutes because there is no way Eddy Curry plays more than 100 minutes this year or else I am becoming a Nets fan.

2011 Knicks Forecast

Using the weighted averages the Knicks look to win 27 games. Using last years performances the Knicks figure to win 30 games. Although as a caveat to those numbers, I thank Arturo greatly for his Wins Produced numbers, but I do not think Wilson Chandler is primarily a power forward but rather he is more often a shooting guard. The Knicks acquired players in the David Lee deal who were all injured last year and none of them played more than 1000 minutes.
Getting those guys healthy is of major importance to this team because I do not want to see Eddy Curry on the floor at all.

With all that, for 2011 I expect to see more minutes than forecasted from Gallo, Azuibuike, and Anthony Randoplh. Due to the positional difference with Wilson Chandler, I would say that the forecasted numbers are a bit low.

Final Prediction:

36-46