Forecasting the Utah Jazz’s 2017-18 win total with Win Shares

Kristin Murphy, Deseret NewsSALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Jazz won 51 games en route to their first postseason appearance since 2012 last year.

They should make the playoffs again this season, but just barely.

According to a projection system based on Win Shares, the Jazz will win 44 games — enough, perhaps, for the No. 8 seed.

Win Shares is an all-encompassing metric that attempts to divide and distribute credit for a team’s success to its individual players. Thus, the sum of a team’s player Win Shares is roughly equal to its win total.

My forecast formula takes into account three year’s worth of Basketball-Reference’s Win Shares Per 48 Minutes stat, an aging curve and estimated minutes based, in…