Back in the spring, after he averaged 26 points per game during the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, it would have been hard to believe that the hype around Zion Williamson could reach new heights. But now, a week from opening night of the NBA season, there’s perhaps more confidence than ever that Williamson will become […]
On Thursday, we rolled out our new NBA metric, named RAPTOR — the Robust Algorithm (using) Player Tracking (and) On-court/off-court Results — along with our new 2019-20 RAPTOR-fueled player and team forecasts, and a thorough explanation of the system from my boss, Nate Silver. But since we released an early, pre-RAPTOR version of our predictions […]
At FiveThirtyEight, we’ve been running NBA predictions since 2015. We started with Elo ratings before introducing our CARMELO player projection system, which we then incorporated into our “CARM-Elo” season prediction model. We tested and tweaked the prediction model over the years, but it was always powered by metrics from other sources, such as Box Plus/Minus […]
Our projection system 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.
With the NBA preseason officially underway, we’re unveiling something new. Since 2015, FiveThirtyEight has put out forecasts for the NBA season based on player ratings from ESPN and Basketball-Reference.com. But this year, we created our own player rating metric — called RAPTOR — which will power this season’s forecast. FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver joins for […]