Comparing this season's Celtics to last season's

So far the Celtics seem to be getting the same results, recordwise, as they got last season. But I know from doing previous calculations that the marginal production of two of their biggest players -- Garnett and Pierce -- has fallen off. So I was curious how exactly the Celtics of this season compared with the Celtics of last season.

To answer that question I did a modified Win Profile of this season's team, using only Total Win Contribution, in order to compare those numbers to the numbers the team produced last season.

Click Here to see my Win Contribution comparison between this season's Boston Celtics and last season's Boston Celtics

Here's the story so far, as I see it. The Celtics are getting improved production from 3 sources: Ray Allen, Rajon Rondo, and Kendrick Perkins. Allen is up substantially, Rondo is up quite a bit, and Perkins has improved to a lesser extent.

But overall the team is still off from last season's lofty standards by about -0.408. That is largely because of diminished contributions from 4 players: Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Eddie House, and Baby Davis. Garnett and Pierce are still well above average, but they are off substantially from their outstanding numbers of last season. House and Davis, on the other hand, have gone from above average and average last season, to average and below average this season.

The rest of the Celtics are off last season's pace as well, but to a lesser extent.

All in all, the dropoff in marginal production puts the Celtics on a 60-22 win-loss trajectory, or 6 games off last season's pace. That's still outstanding, but if you take into account the improvements made by their rivals, it will make repeating as World Champions pretty difficult.