2008-2009 NBA Individual Player Stat Projections

Question: Why are you posting projections now? There are still injuries and depth chart situations to settle!

Answer: Because once you read how I figured out the projections, you'll realize it doesn't matter when I post them—they'd be the same now as they will be in a month.

It's football baseball hockey basketball season, and it's time for those lousy expert predictions.

Not the team ones, however.

These are the stat projections for every player in the NBA that played last year. (Sorry, all you Derrick Rose fans, but rookies aren't included; for now, they'll have to be equal to league average.) Yeah, you'll see a few names that aren't playing (Jorge Garbajosa, Chris Webber), but I was too lazy to go through the 400-plus names to delete them (except for Josh Childress—I was scanning through the projections and saw his name, so I deleted him). Louis Amundson was also taken out, because his projections were somehow out of the ordinary—78 minutes per game, 30 points per game, etc.

How were the stats determined?

I used the exact same method that baseball sabermetrician Tangotiger uses in his "Marcel the Monkey Forecasting System," explained here (I take no credit in the projections method).The only difference is that I used 3,936 minutes (12 minutes per game for 82 games times two) instead of 1,200 PAs, didn't use an age adjustment, and calculated projected games played using the following formulas:

For players who played each of the past three years, weigh each year on a 5/4/3 scale, add them, then divide by 12.

For players who played only two of the past three years, weigh each year on a 5/4 scale, add them, and divide by 4.5.

For players who only played last year, use the games played from 2007 as projected games played.

Data was taken from databaseBasketball.com 's downloadable database. UPDATE: The Dwight Howard problem is fixed. The updated spreadsheet is on my website, and the link is at the bottom.

Before I get to the actual projections, here are some clarifications on the colored columns:

Proj. AV is projected Approximate Value, explained here.

Proj. VI is projected Versatility Index, explained here .

Proj. APV is projected Approximate Player Value, the statistic I created last week .

Proj. TNDX is projected TENDEX, which is equal to (Points + Rebounds + Assists + Steals + Blocks - Turnovers - Free Throws Missed - Field Goals Missed) / Minutes played.

Proj. MM is projected magic metric, explained here .

Adj. Total is the sum of all of the above, but weighted to make each stat's average become equal to all the others. (If you were wondering, the Adj. Total formula is AV * 3.2 + VI * 5.2 + TENDEX * 2.1 + APV + MM * 0.035.)

Okay, enough with the stalling. Here are the 2008 projections for every player who played a minute last year (with thanks to www.zoho.com, and note that it may take a while to load).

To see the projections, you have to head over to my website (the link is right here) because I couldn't get the iframe to post on this article—it's not to get views over there, I swear.