Basketball-Reference.com Blog: Early Win Shares-Projected 2009-10 Standings

I would look at these, as the title indicates, as standings predictions rather than win predictions. Or as Neil Paine puts it:

...remember that these projections will be unrealistically close to the mean for players, teams, and playing time numbers, because of the heavy degree of regression being used.

The Hawks are 9th in the projected standings. The distribution of minutes in Paine's projections is more conservative than what I used to project the Hawks to 43 wins 10 weeks ago (before the acquisitions of Joe Smith and Jason Collins).

I think we can all agree that if Mario West, Randolph Morris, and Jason Collins combine to play as many minutes as Zaza Pachulia and Joe Smith, then this season will be an uphill battle.

Converting Paine's win share rates to the minutes I used previously and adding Smith and Collins to the mix gives the Hawks 39.6 projected wins. With the exceptions of Josh Smith and Jeff Teague (interesting exceptions in that I'm high on both those guys) my rough approximations of win share rates were more optimistic than those in this more comprehensive effort.

Rare proof of optimism at Hoopinion.