Who's going to the Hall?

This is one of those useful-but-fun areas of speculation in sports, although I suppose it has some use to the truly degenerate gambler who wants to place wagers on the outcome of Hall of Fame voting.

Justin at b-r.com has produced a simple but accurate multivariate regression to estimate hall of fame likelihoods for all active NBA players. Hard to argue with the top of the list (well, the last three are iffy because great stats combined with scant playoff success is certainly no guarantee):

The second tier is a little more interesting (players with 10% chance or better of making the hall):

I think a better method could probably be found, but I can't imagine one getting near 100% accurate. It's very very easy to predict who will NOT make the hall of fame, and the casual fan could do it at a glance. For example, I'm going to go out on a limb and say no one on the Cavaliers aside from LeBron James has a chance in hell of being selected. Check back in 20 years, but I'm almost sure I'm 100% accurate on that barring Damon Jones taking a grotesque amount of steroids and actually trying to play within 20 feet of the basket on either end.

Obviously the real chucklers here are Marbury and Francis, the two absolute punch-lines for the-basketball-team-formerly-known-as-the-Knicks. It's almost impossible to remember that up to 2005, Marbury was a dominant 23/3/8 every season, with some pretty impressive stats like leading the NBA in total assists in 2003-04 and missing 2 total games over the course of four years in his prime. Francis was rookie of the year, a versatile 21/6/6 PG, and regularly a league leader in minutes played and assists per game. Although I never saw him play much, he was sort of a beefier Iverson, with less overall scoring but similar skills and getting to the rim and more rebounding.

While those players at least offered some flashes of brilliance, I have a hard time believing Antoine Walker will ever get the call to Springfield. When I looked up his career achievements, I came up with this:

1. Leader in three-pointers taken three years running.
   
2. Six years in league top 10 for turnovers.
   
3. Once got 6 votes for MVP. Wait, WAAATTTTTT???!

If you're wondering about Cassell - surely a long shot to make the Hall - he's in there because the model weights championships very heavily. If that's true, then a win with the Celtics this year could profoundly help his cause. Very few players have won three championships since the Bulls dynasty ended, and the few who have are already at the top of the list (Kobe, Shaq, Duncan, Parker).

You can see that the young stars who've put up pretty good numbers on pretty good teams present the most interesting case. I can't see how Shawn Marion's chances are going to improve very much unless Miami really dominates, or he has the complete green light on offense. Elton Brand on the other hand has a decent shot

Below this you see the second tier stars who've either put up decent numbers on great teams (Billups, Ginobili, Rasheed Wallace) or great numbers on mediocre-to-bad teams (Gasol, Jamison, Baron Davis).