FiveThirtyEight Predicts a 25-Win Season for the Sixers
FiveThirtyEight has started to roll out their stat-steeped projections for the upcoming NBA season, and as always, it’s all based on a projection system you’ve never heard of and don’t understand. This one is called CARMELO, but it has nothing to do with being a no-good franchise destroyer and hogging the ball. To put it very simply, “for each current NBA player, CARMELO identifies similar players throughout modern NBA history and uses their careers to forecast the current player’s future.” It gets much deeper and more complex over here, but we both know you aren’t going to read that.
So FiveThirtyEight puts the Sixers’ record at 25-57 on the year. But that’s not really what this preview is about. This one takes the Sixers’ top contributors (Noel, Okafor, Wroten, Stauskas, Grant, and Covington) through the CARMELO lens, predicting the rest of their career (really, the next handful of seasons). So how does it look? Let’s take Jahlil as an example:
Jahlil Okafor figures to be an extremely strong and polished post scorer, but he has a lot to prove about his ability to play NBA defense. So, looking at his comparable, the Sixers would be thrilled if he turned out more Derrick Favors (a solid defender) than Derrick Williams (a dreadful one). Okafor and Noel are the frontcourt of the future for the Sixers, but it will be important that they figure out how to complement each other’s games this season.
The rest of the comparisons aren’t so kind. Nerlens is measured up against Nene (which I will take), Tony Wroten to Lou Williams (a steal, really), Stauskas to the guy he couldn’t start over (Ben McLemore) and a dude who got a huge contract this year (Khris Middleton), while Grant matches up with dudes who never lived up to their potential, and Covington could pad his defense to compare to Danny Green.
Using my own personal CARMELO, I figure that Furkan Aldemir matches up comparatively with a stiff mannequin with human hands, Pierre Jackson is one of those plastic frog toys that flip up really high in the air that you get in quarter machines , and Joel Embiid is ‘The Phantom of the Center.’ Sam Hinkie is, of course, Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget.