ESPN’s John Hollinger used his Player Efficiency Rating to estimate the number of games this group would win if surrounded by 10 minimum salary veterans.

Using my preseason prediction model, I plugged in a team with those three players and used fairly conservative estimates for what they might produce in the coming season — a Player Efficiency Rating of 29 for James, 26 for Wade and 23 for Bosh. I gave James 3,100 minutes, Wade 2,850 and Bosh 2,600.

For every other minute played by Team Trinity, I inserted my replacement-level figure of a 10 PER — this is what I input when a team has an empty rotation spot or has it filled by a player projected to produce less than 10. I never go any lower than this and have never felt a need to, as virtually anyone who produces at a lesser rate (once we include defensive value) is quickly replaced.

OK, that’s my methodology; now for the result. This team, believe it or not, projected to win 61 games.

And that assumes all replacement level players. The roster could improve at midseason when a vet is bought out or waived, and next summer when the team would have the various exceptions available to add higher-priced talent.

John Hollinger revisited his Draft Rater, and put together his personal, “totally subjective” draft board for Thursday’s draft.

There are several big names missing — Ed Davis, Ekpe Udoh — but the one I’m interested in is Patrick Patterson.

Reader “jfountain1523″ said the following about Patterson’s absence from Hollinger’s list: “I assume its the poor rebounding and being a bit short for his position that ruled him out in Hollinger’s rater.”

Let’s take the last part first. Is he “a bit short for his position”? He’s 6-9.25 in shoes and has a 7-1.25 wingspan. Looking at last year’s measurements, he’s three-quarters of an inch shorter than Blake Griffin, but his wingspan and standing reach are two inches wider/higher. Was anyone worried about Griffin’s size this time last year?

Now, regarding the rebounding. This is a funny criticism to make and it’s based on his rpg this season (7.4). Yeah, that’s not great for a power forward in college, but digging a little deeper and things don’t look so bad. In his sophomore year, he averaged 9.3 rebounds per game, which is just 0.5 rebounds less than rebound monster DeMarcus Cousins averaged this season. And speaking of Cousins, wouldn’t playing alongside a great rebounder like that only serve to reduce the number of boards available for Patterson? Of course his rebounding numbers were going to dip this season.

In the end, I think Patterson will make some late lottery team in need of a power forward very happy. I don’t think he’ll be a star, but he could certainly average 15-8 in a starter’s role.

Last year, John Hollinger’s Draft Rater really liked Ty Lawson and Tyreke Evans, and that turned out well. The year before, it liked Michael Beasley over Derrick Rose, who wasn’t even listed as the top point guard in the draft. It also liked Kevin Love (score) and thought Anthony Randolph was way overrated (fail).

In the past, Hollinger’s system has been pretty accurate, all things considered.

The Draft Rater has yet to miss a lottery pick who became an All-Star in its top 12 collegians list — although that string may end in another year or two thanks to a miserable 2008 performance (Russell Westbrook and Brook Lopez both were overlooked that year). And if it’s blown a couple of picks, look at the actual draft and you’ll find even more mistakes by the pro teams themselves.

On the other hand, the Draft Rater has picked out five All-Stars that the pros missed among the first 12 collegians — Carlos Boozer, Rajon Rondo, Danny Granger, Josh Howard, and David West. No misses, five additions. I like that ratio.

It’s a good read, but to sum up, the Rater thinks DeMarcus Cousins is the top player in the draft, with Evan Turner and John Wall reasonably close behind. Questions about Cousins’ coachability will likely hinder his draft stock, but I think he’s going to be a great player. You don’t rebound like he does and not love the game. He just needs to get into a good, stable situation with a solid coach and grow up a little bit.

It’s going to be interesting to watch how he progresses through the draft process. Do we hear stories about how he’s texting his friends during interviews with NBA teams? Does he dog it in certain workouts? If he acts like a pro over the next month, it could mean he’s picked #2 or #3 instead of #5 or #6.

The Rater also predicts some duds; Cole Aldrich, Patrick Patterson, Ekpe Udoh, Ed Davis and Hassan Whiteside are the big names on that list.

Photo from fOTOGLIF

Chad Ford and John Hollinger tag-teamed a piece [Insider subscription required] where they ranked all 30 NBA teams with five criteria — players, management, money, market and draft — with an eye on the future.

The top three were the Blazers, Magic and Lakers. The bottom three were the Bobcats, Bucks and Kings. Here’s the writeup for the Blazers:

On paper, no other team possesses as bright a future as the Portland Trail Blazers. It all starts with the players. Nobody, not even Oklahoma City, can match the stable of young talent the Blazers have built. Brandon Roy is already a superstar, and joining him are potential stars like LaMarcus Aldridge (24), Greg Oden (21, even if he looks more like 51), Nicolas Batum (20) and Martell Webster (22). That doesn’t even count the other assets the Blazers have that could eventually pan out, such as talented second-year benchwarmer Jerryd Bayless and a veritable farm team in Europe that includes Joel Freeland, Petteri Koponen and Victor Claver.

Portland also gets strong grades in other categories. The management under GM Kevin Pritchard has been rock-solid, with the only minor quibble being the decision to draft Oden ahead of Kevin Durant — a decision, one should remember, that all 30 GMs were prepared to make, even if a lot of fans and analysts weren’t. In terms of money, the Blazers have no cap room to speak of for the foreseeable future, but being owned by one of the world’s wealthiest men in a rabid city where sellouts are the norm means the Blazers can comfortably go into luxury tax and beyond should the need arise.

Portland market didn’t score as highly in the market category — witness Hedo Turkoglu’s about-face — as sad, dreary winters, the nation’s highest state taxes and a relative lack of diversity for a major metropolitan area limit its attractiveness to free agents. They stay in the middle of the pack in this category largely due to Allen’s largesse, with first-rate team facilities, and the fact that a lot of players grow to like the place once they’ve been there — it helped bring Steve Blake back, for instance.

The draft is where Portland scored poorly, but even that is a positive in a sense — with such a bright future, it can expect to pick in the mid-to-late 20s in coming seasons.

The feature does a pretty nice job of evaluating how each team is positioned heading into the next five years.

Earlier in the day, I wrote about how Chad Ford is hearing that Ty Lawson is shooting up some draft boards, and now John Hollinger’s Draft Rater (where he takes college statistics and a few other metrics to predict a player’s production in the NBA) says that he’s the top player in this draft. Yes, he’s even ahead of Blake Griffin.

Lawson, who is coming off an electric performance in leading North Carolina to the championship, grades out highly for several reasons: Although he’s short for a point guard, his shooting numbers (47.1 percent on 3-pointers), strong assist rate and microscopic turnover ratio (9.1, first among point guard prospects) all point to him as an NBA keeper.

The Draft Rater puts Lawson slightly ahead of Griffin for first, but this doesn’t mean a team should take Lawson first. The standard error in the projections for point guards is higher than it is for big men, which means random noise could be putting Lawson ahead just as easily as on-the-court performance. If the consensus is that Griffin is the better player, I don’t think Lawson’s statistical record alone is strong enough evidence to refute it. Additionally, we’ve heard questions about Lawson’s work ethic and injuries.

But the rating is emphatic enough for me to say Lawson should be at the top of the college point guard ladder, ahead of Jonny Flynn, Jrue Holiday, Jeff Teague & Co. (If you’re wondering about Ricky Rubio, I’ll have more on him next week.)

Hollinger’s Draft Rater isn’t error-proof but it’s not a bad second opinion when trying to pick a player out of a group of two or more.

Or when you’re trying to avoid a bust…

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…when I read a Bill Simmons mailbag.

Anyway, there was a really funny moment Thursday that could have only happened at a Lakers game. Near the end of a third-quarter timeout, the camera caught Val Kilmer and three of his chins on the JumboTron, punctuating the moment by playing “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins. You know, a “Top Gun” homage. He took a second or two to get the joke, then unleashed one of those “Very funny, you got me, just know that I’m on a lot of meds right now” smiles. And this would have been enjoyable on its own, but they cut to someone else in the stands. …

That’s right. …

Tom Cruise!

He caught on a little quicker and did the Tom Cruise Over-Laugh. And this would have been great on its own, but the Lakers pushed it to another level: They went split-screen with Kilmer and Cruise with “Danger Zone” still blasting. As far as I was concerned, this was the most emotional reunion in Lakers history. Cruise kept laughing; Kilmer looked mildly perturbed. (After all, he’s an actor, dammit! That was 23 years ago! He’s made a lot of movies since then!) At this point, I was praying they’d cut to Anthony Edwards in Section 312 but he wasn’t there.

Ha! Great one about Anthony Edwards sitting in the upper level.

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There’s a pretty good chance that the current top eight teams in each conference will be the same 16 teams that make the playoffs. According to John Hollinger’s playoff odds, the Charlotte Bobcats have a 4.5% chance and the Indiana Pacers have a 1.1% chance to earn a spot. The Bobcats are four games back of the Bulls and the Pistons with five games to play, so they essentially have to win out or go 4-1 and hope either Chicago or Detroit has a complete meltdown. The Pacers are five games back, so their margin for error is even slimmer.

In the West, the Suns’ recent play (2-4 over their last six) has whittled their playoff chances down to 1.2%. Last night’s game in Dallas was pretty much a must-win, but the Suns lost by 24 points. There is a logjam amongst the likely playoff teams in the West; #3 San Antonio and #8 Dallas are separated by just 3.5 games, so we could see a serious shuffling of playoff matchups over the last week of the season.

Like most basketball fans, my attention at this time of the year has a tendency to be focused squarely on March Madness, but there’s this little thing called the NBA regular season that is still going on (who knew?) and there are several teams involved a heated race for the playoffs that start in mid-April.

EASTERN CONFERENCE

ESPN’s John Hollinger says that there are six Eastern Conference teams that have better than a 99% chance of earning a playoff spot this year: Cleveland, Boston, Orlando and Atlanta, who are all at 100%, along with Miami and Philadelphia.

Right now, Hollinger gives the Bulls (90%) and the Pistons (89%) the inside track for the last two spots in the East. There are four teams — Charlotte (9%), Indiana (7%), New Jersey (5%) and Milwaukee (3%) — that are varying degrees of longshots to earn a final spot. They’re sitting at 30 or 31 wins, three or four wins behind Chicago or Detroit, so with about 10 games remaining, it’s conceivable that the Bulls or Pistons could collapse and one or more of these teams could get hot.

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The rosters for the T-Mobile Rookie Challenge have been announced and there are a few surprises.

The rookie roster consists of Derrick Rose, Russell Westbrook, O.J. Mayo, Eric Gordon, Rudy Fernandez, Michael Beasley, Brook Lopez, Greg Oden and Marc Gasol.

The sophomore roster includes Rodney Stuckey, Aaron Brooks, Kevin Durant, Wilson Chandler, Jeff Green, Al Thornton, Luis Scola, Al Horford and Thaddeus Young.

Kevin Love isn’t on the nine-man roster for the Rookie Challenge, and it’s a big, glaring snub. ESPN’s John Hollinger agrees.

For starters, the decision to select Eric Gordon ahead of Kevin Love for the rookies was completely inexcusable.

Don’t get me wrong; Gordon is going to have a fine career, it seems, and in almost any other year he’d be a shoo-in for the team. But he made this squad mainly because the forlorn Clippers have no choice but to play him extensive minutes.

As good as he’s looked, Gordon is the only rookie team member with a Player Efficiency Rating below the league average, while Love has a better PER than every player on the rookie team except Greg Oden. Love leads the league in offensive rebound rate, as I mentioned the other day, but his prodigious work on the boards has gone largely unnoticed because he plays only 23.2 minutes a game, far less than Gordon’s 32.2.

Love’s absence is especially surprising considering how the rookie roster is loaded with four guards (Rose, Westbrook, Mayo, Gordon), one G/F (Fernandez) and only one true forward (Beasley). You’d think that if it were a tossup between Gordon and Love (which it isn’t) that they’d at least want to get another true forward on the roster to balance things out.

Hollinger goes on to rail against the sophomore roster snubs, which included Wilson Chandler over Jamario Moon, Al Thornton over Carl Landry and the worst of all (he says) — Aaron Brooks over Ramon Sessions.

Interestingly, seven of the top 11 picks of the 2007 draft — Mike Conley, Yi Jianlian, Corey Brewer, Brandan Wright, Joakim Noah, Spencer Hawes and Acie Law — did NOT make the sophomore roster. (I counted Greg Oden amongst the four since he made the rookie roster.) Conversely, six of the top 11 picks in the 2008 draft did make the rookie team.

John Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Rating is a nice way to compare players without having to account for the number of minutes each guy gets. It’s an efficiency statistic, so just about everything is included. A PER of 15.00 is average for the position.

Let’s take a look at the top rookies. I’m only going to list guys that are getting more than 20 minutes per game…

1. Kevin Love, T-Wolves
PER: 16.39
Surprised? I am…a little. I really liked Love coming out of college, but he got off to a slow start and the trade Minnesota made (sending O.J. Mayo) to Memphis wasn’t looking too good early on. He’s not shooting the ball well (41%), but he’s rebounding like a champ (8.4 rpg in 22.7 mpg).

2. Greg Oden, Blazers
PER: 16.35
Technically, Oden is still a rookie since he missed all of last season due to injury. After Love, he has the second best rebound rate of all first-year players.

3. Brook Lopez, Nets
PER: 16.26
Rebounding is the stat that most easily translates from college to the pros, so it’s no surprise that three good rebounders top this list. In 29.5 minutes, Lopez is averaging 11.4 points and 8.2 rebounds, and he has more blocks per minute than Oden.

4. Rudy Fernandez, Blazers
PER: 16.25
Rudy has had no problem adjusting to the NBA game. His three-point shooting 39% is outstanding and he’s averaging 11.0 points, 3.0 rebounds and 2.1 assists in 26.5 minutes per game. Plus, he was even voted into the Slam Dunk Contest as well.

5. Marc Gasol, Grizzlies
PER: 15.40
The other Gasol is getting starters minutes (30.6) in Memphis and is averaging 11.3 points and 7.3 rebounds per game.

6. Russell Westbrook, Thunder
PER: 15.74
In January, Westbrook is averaging 15.7 points, 6.2 assists and 4.8 rebounds in 34.9 minutes of action. He got off to a slow start, but seems to be figuring things out now.

7. O.J. Mayo, Grizzlies
PER: 15.66
Of all the guys on this list, Mayo might be the guy that asked to do the most. He got off to a blistering start, but defenses are adjusting and his numbers are falling.

8. Derrick Rose, Bulls
PER: 15.45
He and Mayo play more than 37 minutes per game, which is by far tops on this list. It’s hard to argue with the 16.9 points and 6.4 assists that Rose produces every night. Point guard is arguably the toughest position in the NBA to learn as a rookie, and this guy sure looks like a keeper.

9. Michael Beasley, Heat
PER: 15.23
Beasley is getting better as the season wears on. He’s averaging 14.9 points (on 50% shooting) and 6.0 rebounds in January. He’s also as good as expected from long range (39%).

10. D.J. Augustin, Bobcats
PER: 13.75
It’s not easy being a point guard under Larry Brown, but Augustin is getting big minutes (28.4) and is producing 12.1 points and 4.1 assists per contest. His shooting (40%) is pretty suspect, though he’s very solid from long range (39%).

Notes:

- Marreese Speights leads all rookies in PER (20.44) but only plays 15.9 minutes per game.

- Anthony Morrow and George Hill just missed the minutes per game cutoff. Otherwise, they would have been on the list.

- Given how tough it is to play point guard in the NBA, Derrick Rose still gets my vote for Rookie of the Year. The Bulls are asking him to play huge minutes, which is going to take its toll over the course of the season.