Thread by @NateSilver538

We're halfway thru the NBA season, so as promised, a quarterly check-in of how our new NBA metric (RAPTOR) is performing vs. Vegas.

It's good news for RAPTOR, which remains on pace to have more accurate team win projections than Vegas. We're pretty excited about this. 🦖🦖🦖

The Lakers, which RAPTOR has come around on but we were bearish on in the preseason, remain our big Achilles' heel. Still, as you can see above—which sorts teams by how much our projections differed from Vegas—RAPTOR is winning most of its big "bets" (OKC, SAS, NYK, MEM, etc.)

RAPTOR also seems to be doing well vs. the other statistical systems we're tracking; however, I'd note that PIPM from @JacobEGoldstein is also having a really good year. bball-index.com/current-pipm/

You can always find our latest RAPTOR team projections here:
projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-nba-predi…

And the latest RAPTOR player ratings here: projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-nba-playe…