If you multiply each player's PER by his minutes played, add that number for all players on a team, and divide the sum by total minutes played this season for the team, the average team is supposed to be 15. Per my spreadsheet, it's 20.35417 for us and 15.1867 for the Lakers. Why are they slightly above average if they are winless?
Maybe their opponents are really getting up for them? Maybe they're going through the motions, playing good but not meeting their opponents at the level they're playing?
You have a logic fault. PER isn't an indication of victories. You should consider using Points scored/against in your spreadsheet.
Maybe they're the best damn 0-10 team in the league! But you're probably right. The Lakers are currently average, and their two opponents played above average. (I have no idea how Hollinger's formula would psychically know that.)
One would expect a winless team to have a below average team PER. Except for the Strength of Schedule explanation above. A good team playing against better teams might still have a good team PER.
Again, logic fault. 15 "average" players can win a championship. 15 "awesome PER" players can get bounced in the first round or not even make it. The only correlation I see with winning is in having at least one or two guys with super high PERs.
Wins should correlate with team PER because both derive from a common cause, above-average boxscore stats.
Wins derive from exactly one thing. More points than the opponent. I'll put it another way. A team loses 82 games, but scores 150 points in each game. They lose at least 151-150. They'll have amazing PER, individually. But no wins.
No, they'll have an amazing efficiency average stat, but a substandard PER. The reason is that the latter is normalized to 15; the former is not standardized. For so many teams to be better than the high-scoring but losing team, those teams must be better than the losing team in "quality." Overall league "quality" will be higher than in the average year. But since PER is normalized to 15, that high quality won't show in the PER stats. So the losing but excellent team will still possess a PER well below 15. So wins loosely correlate with team PER, even for the losing team which scores 150 every game. All those better teams just move the bar (the "quality" required to have a 15 PER) upward.
Once you realize games are won by the team with the most points, you'll realize your logic fault. The Lakers have 3 guys with heavy minutes and BIG PER. That tide lifts the other boats. And for the remaining games, the rest of the league has regular scores. You will have the AHA! moment.
You're saying that 47% of the team are dumb drones who drag it down. The elite, the genetic eagles born to lead, the movers and shakers, determine the wins, no matter how much they are dragged down by progressive tax rates.
Yes, a team can be viewed as a class system, with bad play from the bottom half not correlating to wins, but correlating to (bringing down) team PER. But a correlation you deny is that between points, and all other boxscore stats (and thus between wins and PER). I just noticed an eagle peering at me in this picture.
