This season, you'll find the results of my SCHOENE projection system for the NBA exclusively on ESPN Insider and in ESPN The Magazine's NBA preview issue. Here's some more detail on how SCHOENE works.
Player projections
The process begins with player projections. Performance over the past three seasons, weighted by age, generates a baseline projection. SCHOENE uses this baseline projection, adjusted for league averages, to find the most similar past players in 13 categories (including height and weight) at the same age (within six months in either direction). A perfect match would be a 100, while anything better than 95 indicates close similarity and a score of better than 90 shows some similarity.
For 2013-14, the best match is the trade-off between usage and efficiency.
Defense is modeled using a combination of player projections and team-specific factors like shot defense, ratio of 3-pointers to 2-pointers and ability to force non-steal turnovers. Defensive rebounding is also adjusted to account for diminishing returns when combining several good rebounders (or vice versa).
Together, the projections yield a SCHOENE universe in which every point scored by one team must be allowed by another and player and team projections add up. Team win estimates are generated based on Anderson Varejao (34).
At the team level, I adjusted the team defensive factors to consider how much the roster turned over from the previous season. Teams that return a higher percentage of their minutes played are expected to retain more of their defensive characteristics from the season before, while those with heavy turnover are expected to regress to the mean. (There was already a factor regressing teams that change coaches to the mean.)
Lastly, because defensive performance gets regressed to the mean much more than offensive performance, I doubled the spread of projected defensive efficiency to try to avoid underprojecting defensive-minded teams like the Indiana Pacers and the Memphis Grizzlies, who have given SCHOENE a difficult time in the past.
Still, as usual SCHOENE has generated some surprising forecasts. You'll hear about those throughout Insider's NBA preview.
About the name
Following in the tradition of Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA projections, Football Outsiders' KUBIAK system and Puck Prospectus' VUKOTA, SCHOENE is named after a former player -- Russ Schoene, who played four seasons in the NBA in the '80s, including three with my beloved Seattle SuperSonics. Schoene is pronounced SHAY-nee, like danke schoen with an "e" on the end.