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2018-19 NBA Predictions

How this works: These forecasts are based on 50,000 simulations of the rest of the season. Elo ratings — which power the pure Elo forecast — are a measure of team strength based on head-to-head results, margin of victory and quality of opponent. Our CARMELO forecast doesn’t account for wins and losses; it is based […]

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Oh, You Won Your Ring On A Superteam? Big Deal

Despite all the advances statheads have made in how we measure NBA greatness, many fans still regard championship rings as the ultimate arbiter of a star player’s legacy. And although some scoff at such a simplistic measure, basketball is deterministic enough that the top players do generally tend to accumulate more than their share of […]

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How Liz Cambage Broke The WNBA’s Scoring Record

Scoring is up across the board in the WNBA this year, and one player, Dallas Wings center Liz Cambage, aimed to keep it that way Tuesday when she scored 53 points — the highest individual total in league history — during a 104-87 victory over the New York Liberty. And given the other elements of […]

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Our NBA Player Projections Are Ready For 2018-19

Just in time for the NBA’s free agent bonanza (headlined by LeBron James’s The Decision: Part III), FiveThirtyEight has re-launched CARMELO, our NBA player projection system, with forecasts for 2018-19 and beyond. The basics of the system are largely similar to previous years, with the backbone of CARMELO remaining an algorithm that compares current players […]

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