Since we're on the topic of baseball, I'm going to expand my thoughts on this. Being both a huge baseball fan and a nerd, I've loved following the growth of sabermetrics in baseball over the last few years. I'd love to see other sports start getting in to more in-depth sabermetrics - but none of them will be as easy to analyze as baseball.
While baseball is a team sport, it is still much easier to measure individual performance than it is in other sports. One person is at bat at a time. One pitcher is pitching at a time. Usually, only one defender has the potential to field the ball at a time. Yes, the team can affect the performance of an individual in some small ways - who bats in front of and behind a certain player, the quality of the whole lineup (runs, rbi, etc.), the playcalling skill of the catcher can affect the pitcher, the defense behind the pitcher (which is starting to be easily accounted for), and other small things. However, given the relative simplicity of the sport, sabermatrics in baseball is still immensely complicated. It is often said that it takes at least 1/2 to 2/3 of a season to have enough data for a certain player to be able to accurately model how that player will perform for the rest of the season. It can take many, many years to have enough data for a certain player to be able to accurately model how well that player will perform over his career.
So now we come to baseball, which is far less individualistic than baseball. Every single play, offense and defense, is changed in some way by every player. There are also a million things that happen in a basketball game that cannot be tracked in the scoresheet. In baseball, every single pitch (velocity, trajectory, pitch type, break, EVERYTHING), every single swing, and every single fielded ball is tracked and analyzed. There is also a very important "chemistry" or "teamwork" element in basketball that is nearly nonexistent in baseball.
Hopefully you can see why I put incredibly little stock in the accuracy of these projections. Is Royce White good? Absolutely. Would he have made the Gophers better? Can't imagine he wouldn't. But to try to model the affect a player that has never played at this level could have on each game is, I think, far beyond our sabermetric abilities at this point. That said, I do think this is a great and interesting idea. I'd love to see the math (and explanation) that went into these numbers.
