For all the talk lately of the NBA’s dwindling television ratings, there is one potential saving grace on the way Wednesday: Zion Williamson, the most-hyped No. 1 pick since LeBron James a little more than a decade and a half ago, is slated to make his regular-season debut as a pro. Finally, after a half-season […]
When the Westgate Las Vegas SuperBook’s 2019-20 NBA championship odds first opened back in May, the Golden State Warriors were the early favorites to win this season’s title. At +175, the Warriors’ odds implied a 36 percent chance to win the championship — pretty high in absolute terms, but low relative to recent Warriors odds, […]
Now that we’ve thoroughly broken down the best and worst — sorry again, Collin Sexton — players of the player-tracking era (since 2013), let’s zoom out to look at a larger slice of NBA history. As a refresher, we just introduced a new player rating metric, RAPTOR — the Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) […]
neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): We chatted on Monday about the NBA’s Western Conference, in advance of the season starting tonight, so let’s talk about the East now. At the moment, our predictions say the two big favorites are the Milwaukee Bucks and the Philadelphia 76ers. The defending champion (and model namesake) Toronto Raptors are […]
One of the cool side effects of overhauling our NBA projections with a new player metric, RAPTOR — the Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) On-court/off-court Results — was the need to build historical RAPTOR estimates for players who would show up as comparisons for current stars. That means we have a brand-new set of […]