Similar to what I’ve done with baseball, I’m now running new projections daily for NBA players under the name RV Current. These projections add current year data into the model, increasing the weight given to the current season as more games are played.
This early in the season, the numbers aren’t much different from my preseason projections. But RV Current will continue to adjust to changing factors and on-court play, whereas the preseason projections just stay the same.
I should add that one other feature of player search pages: when showing projections for some mid-season future date range, they now automatically prorate projections based on known injuries. The site will try to determine a target return date from injury reports, and if a player isn’t expected back soon, his number of games will be reduced by the number he’s expected to miss. The injury reports page now also shows a Target Return? date, which, when present, will result in that players’s stats being scaled down when shown in a Search page. For a PlayerDetail page, the projections will simply show an expected full year projection for a player (which will be for much fewer than 82 games if a player has been especially injury prone in the past).
Projections are always fuzzy, but by incorporating newer data into daily projections, and taking known injuries into account when searching for player data, I’m trying to make them a little bit clearer.