FiveThirtyEight
UPDATED JUL. 1, 2019 AT 2:00 PM
CARMELO NBA Player Projections
FiveThirtyEight’s CARMELO* identifies similar players throughout NBA history and uses them to develop a probabilistic forecast of what a current NBA player’s future might look like.
More NBA:Every team’s Elo historyAbout our 2018-19 player projections
How good will
LeBron James (Cavaliers)
be?
Random player
LeBron James
CLEVELAND CAVALIERS
POWER FORWARD
34 YEARS OLD
WEIGHTED AVERAGE OF PAST THREE SEASONS
BAD
AVG.
GOOD
PERCENTILE
Vitals50TH
Height6’8″
Weight250
Draft position1
Scoring
True shooting %62%
Free throw %71%
Usage %31%
Tendencies
3 pt. frequency25%
FT frequency35%
Passing/ball handling
Assist %43%
Turnover %16%
Defense/rebounding
Rebound %13%
Block %1.7%
Steal %1.8%
Defensive +/-+0.9
Wins above replacement projection
CATEGORY: MVP CANDIDATE
5-YR MARKET VALUE: $312.5M
CONFIDENCE INTERVAL
PROJECTION
’15
2016
’17
’18
’19
’20
’21
’22
’23
’24
’25
’26
0
5
10
15
16.5
15.2
13.0
11.5
9.2
8.2
5.5
3.3
2.1
1.1
16.5
15.2
13.0
11.5
9.2
8.2
5.5
3.3
2.1
1.1
Performance of the 10 most comparable players
1
Karl Malone
YEAR: 1998
SIMILARITY: 29
0
10
20
25
2
Charles Barkley
YEAR: 1997
SIMILARITY: 22
0
10
20
25
3
Julius Erving
YEAR: 1984
SIMILARITY: 16
0
10
20
25
4
Gary Payton
YEAR: 2003
SIMILARITY: 13
0
10
20
25
5
K. Abdul-Jabbar
YEAR: 1981
SIMILARITY: 12
0
10
20
25
6
Hakeem Olajuwon
YEAR: 1997
SIMILARITY: 12
0
10
20
25
7
Clyde Drexler
YEAR: 1996
SIMILARITY: 11
0
10
20
25
8
Larry Bird
YEAR: 1991
SIMILARITY: 11
0
10
20
25
9
Tim Duncan
YEAR: 2010
SIMILARITY: 9
0
10
20
25
10
Dwyane Wade
YEAR: 2016
SIMILARITY: 7
0
10
20
25
The fine print2016’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25
Offensive +/-+6.6+6.6+6.3+5.4+4.4+4.3+3.0+2.0+2.1+1.5
Defensive +/-+3.0+1.8+0.2+0.8+1.0+0.8+0.4+0.5+0.3+0.4
Total +/-+9.6+8.4+6.5+6.2+5.4+5.1+3.4+2.6+2.3+1.9
Value$85.4m$106.0m$95.9m$86.6m$74.4m$70.0m$49.4m$32.1m$22.6m$13.0m
Minutes played270927943026276424832325207915321056606
* FiveThirtyEight’s Career-Arc Regression Model Estimator with Local Optimization (CARMELO) is a system that forecasts a player‘s future performance. The similarity score is an index measuring how comparable one player is to another, scaled such that a score of zero is average similarity and 100 is the highest possible degree of similarity. Plus-minus is derived from Box Plus/Minus, a measure of the number of points per 100 possessions that a player contributed to his team, relative to an average NBA player. All player ages are as of Feb. 1, 2019. Read More »
Sources: Basketball-Reference.com, ESPN, NBA.com and Jeremias Engelmann.
Design and development by Allison McCann and Aaron Bycoffe. Statistical model by Nate Silver. Additional contributions by Neil Paine.
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