My work projecting the NBA using xRAPM has lead to some interesting conversations with readers and other interested NBA fans. It also lead to further discussion with Nathan Walker over of The Basketball Distribution, who was the person who inspired me to start doing these projections in the first place. Through an e-mail exchange, he provided me with a method, using the age and prior year xRAPM of the player in question, which projects xRAPM for the next year very well. The R² is .74. Given that this method seems much more scientific and how startlingly good the results are at predicting future performance based on such simple inputs, I will be re-running my projections for the 8 teams that I’ve already done and then continuing on using the method Nathan provided going forward. The minutes projections will still be done using the Kupfer method described previously here. I plan to try to bang out the remainder of the projections within the next few weeks and then adjust based on strength of schedule and HCA at the end of the process and right before the season gets underway to try and have the best possible projections for you. Basically, we’ve got a brand new recipe and it’s time to get cookin’.
Oh and go follow Nathan on Twitter, since he’s awesome and helped me do a better job than what I was doing.
Image from Timsnell via Flickr
NBA Couchside 