The NBA officially tips off tonight, and hot takes are buzzing around the league in the lead-up to the season opener. FiveThirtyEight and our new RAPTOR metric even drew the ire of ESPN analyst Jalen Rose. We’ll unpack our NBA projections for the season and see how these stack up against the takes. The World […]
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 […]
neil (Neil Paine, senior sportswriter): Hello! Let’s talk about the start of the NBA season, which tips off on Tuesday! We’ll begin with the Western Conference today and dig into the East on Tuesday. I want to start with the team that still ranks No. 1 in our NBA Predictions, even after all the fancy […]
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 […]
ROOOAAARRRRR! (Do raptors roar?) In case you missed it, we recently launched our new metric for evaluating NBA players, which we’re calling RAPTOR: Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) On/Off Ratings. Since we have this nifty new stat, we can finally tackle, and hopefully help settle, some oft-debated player rankings. Is Kemba Walker really an […]