If you’ve followed along with our NBA projection system in recent years, you probably noticed a recurring theme. During the regular season, the Golden State Warriors would either hit dry spells while key players were injured, or coach Steve Kerr, guarding against injuries, would frequently sit key players. Because of that, the Warriors would lose […]
Eagle-eyed FiveThirtyEight readers might have noticed something different about our NBA predictions interactive on Wednesday afternoon: We rolled out a slightly different look to the table based on a pretty significant upgrade to the way we handle NBA forecasts. We’ll have a full methodology page ready soon, but for now we wanted to highlight a […]
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 […]
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 […]
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers are favorites to win their respective conferences and reach the NBA Finals. That’s according to FiveThirtyEight’s “CARM-Elo” projections, which we’ve just launched for the 2017-18 NBA season. The Warriors and Cavs project to be the best regular-season teams in […]