The hypothesis was simple, older players, particularly players in their last year of eligibility for training camp insurance are less susceptible to potential destroying training camps. The theory was based purely on my experience and gut. Answering this question was fairly simple. I took every player from every year before TC insurance was instituted and identified how many letter scores their potentials changed from the year prior. For example, if a player had an A in defensive rebounding and a C in perimeter defense and those potentials dropped to a B and D respectively (asking for a friend), this would count at as a -2. Here is what the breakdown by damage amount per age looks like.
There is some interesting stuff here. For one, we can see that exactly 75% of all potential destroying TCs lower the potential letter grade of either 2,3,4, or (gulp) 5 categories. I’m guessing most of the stuff above that had something to do with a broken leg.
Then I simply counted up how many players per age experienced negative potential change and divided that by the total number of players to go through TC at that age. Again, my main interest here was to understand the distribution of TC deaths over age. Spoiler alert: the answer is a big yes.
One thing to note here is that I only have age at the end of the season rather than age at the time of TC. Either way, you can see the chance of death start to die down in the age 27 year. This is kind of cool because of the way our TC insurance is set up. I’m not sure if this is intentional but the years before 30 that are uninsurable are precisely the years when insurance isn’t really needed. Just a handful of players have ever died at those ages and they very well could have just broken their legs. It is also possible that some of the 28 year olds were actually 27 at the time of TC.
So getting back to my pity party, Ronald Small turns 28 this season, meaning he probably had somewhere between a 9 and 0 percent chance of dying. Zion turned 23 this year, meaning he had somewhere between 23 and 11 percent chance of dying. Joseph Reading turned 25 this year so he had about a 15% chance. So depending on how much you believe that 9%, I probably never should have insured Small. Also, I probably should have insured Zion in his first training camp (when he died the first time) because apparently 19 going on 20 year olds walk into camp with one foot (or at least 3 and half toes) in the grave.
Of course, there is the other side to this coin. What about TC bumps? Does the chance of a player receiving an increase in potential change with age. The answer is once again yes, except that the chance dying in TC does seems to be higher than the chance of getting bumped for pretty much every age group. As we all know, the TC gods taketh away and the TC gods taketh away some more.
Maybe the biggest takeway here and the moral of the story is that once a player hits 27 they are who they are… until they turn 31. I hope this is helpful for everyone as they try to do their best at appeasing the TC gods and avoiding landmines in the rebuilding process.
