MT: Minutes were a problem for Kobe last year, as Byron Scott admitted was his fault early in the season when Bryant was playing 35 per game. How many minutes should Kobe play this year?
Vitti: We don’t know. If he plays 25 minutes, there’s less chance he gets hurt than if he plays 35 minutes. But the 35 minutes, in terms of the shoulder injury had nothing to do with it. I think Byron is going above and beyond by taking the heat. If he played (Bryant) one minute more than he should have, or 10 minutes more, then OK. But the fact is that the injury was trauma-related. Somebody came down on his shoulder.
We did a review of all our injuries last year, and all of the time-loss injuries were trauma-related – people running into other people: stepping on their feet, running into them, etc. The two that weren’t trauma-related were Ryan Kelly straining his hamstring the second practice of training camp. Byron was a new coach with us. We didn’t know how much he was going to do, and...
Predicting the Lakers 2015-16 Win Total
Jamie Rico July 27, 2015 no comment
The Lakers are entering the season filled with uncertainty. They have a completely revamped roster, 2 promising young prospects about to get their first taste of the NBA, and a 37 year old Kobe coming off of 3 straight seasons ending in injury.
Nobody knows for sure how well this team will fare, but we might be able to look into the numbers and come up with a reasonable expectation for the 2015-16 Los Angeles Lakers. The main stat we focused on was win shares. Throughout the season each player accumulates win shares, which shows how many wins that player is directly responsible for. If you add the win shares from everyone on the team, you get about the same amount of wins the team has. This method takes offense and defense into account. According to the creator of the win shares stat, the margin of error for a team’s total is approximately 2.75.
As many of you know I write for silverscreenandroll.com, and I have posted a large number of my articles here for valuable feedback. I appreciate the knowledgeable opinions of all the posters here, especially since so many of us have been discussing Lakers basketball for years on CL before making the upgrade to LB. In short, it's on CL and, by extension, LB that I started really crafting my voice as a writer through the lively discussions we have had. After all, Lakers fandom is nothing if not obsessively captivating.
Since this is where it all began and where I still come for Lakers talk I wanted to share this latest development with all of you. I'm proud to say that I've accepted a job with LakersNation.com, and starting sometime in August I will have a weekly piece appearing there.
Some of you already know this, but LN is the largest Lakers site on the internet by a very large margin. SS&R is #2 and growing, in fact during my time there we blew every other SB Nation NBA blog...
