As the NBA basketball season gets started, FiveThirtyEight has their player projections for how much each will contribute to their team not just this year but in future seasons. The system is called CARMELO. It stands for Career-Arc Regression Model Estimator with Local Optimization but mostly an excuse to name it CARMELO.
Nate Silver describes how they produced the projections and its similarities to his work in 2003 with baseball player projections. Two main steps: define player skills, and then find similar players in NBA history and look at how they performed.
And naturally, attach a whole lot of uncertainty.
Finally, bringing it all together: win-loss record projections for every team.
