Checking 2013-14 NBA Win Predictions & Projections

With 2013-14 NBA regular season in the books it’s time for some fresh projections about the NBA playoffs!
But wait a second, aren’t we forgetting about similar predictions for the regular season? As usual I’d like to expand the effort of APBR community in an attempt to measure how successfully basketball writers, bloggers and authors predicted what will happen during the regular season regarding teams’ wins.
So which writer, blogger or author had the most accurate projections before the 2013-14 NBA season?

To answer this question I saved on my hard drive predictions in early November [it’s a reason why not all of the links below work, they’ve changed since then] from most popular sites and some googled sources [but it’s not a closed list so if you want to add your’s predictions let me know in the comments] and compared them to actual wins for each team by Root Mean Square Deviation which is essentially average difference between each prediction and final total wins in terms of absolute value. Results of this exercise are in the table below…

But please keep in mind two important notes:
1) don’t think or assume it’s all about the skills of people involved because randomness plays a huge part here… injuries and trades in most cases simply couldn’t have been predicted before the season but they affected some of the results in a big way [for example, Gay trade anyone? Or Horford’s shoulder…].
Personally I treat it as fantasy basketball on a team level and I’m more interested in the year-to-year patterns than in actual results for one particular season because it’s basically a sample of one.

2) in most cases entries next to each other are interchangeable in terms of accuracy because difference between them can be translated into “2-3 more/less wins in the right direction would flip them”.

Onto the table…

 

Checking 2012-13 NBA Win Predictions & Projections

Just before every NBA season most basketball writers, bloggers and authors try to predict what will happen in the next year which is usually fun stuff to read and discuss. But I’ve always felt there’s a half of the picture missing – accountability for those predictions.
Recently pundittracker.com started to track single-winner picks which is great but I’d like to continue this blog’s “tradition” with comparing wins projected before the season to the actual ones after the season.
So which writer, blogger or author had the most accurate projections before the 2012-13 NBA season?

To answer this question I gathered predictions in early November from most popular sites and other googled sources [btw, it’s not a closed list so if you want to add your’s predictions let me know in the comments] and compared them to actual results by Root Mean Square Deviation which is essentially average difference between each prediction and result in terms of absolute value.
If you want to play with numbers or check any single entry just download NBA Predictions Accuracy 2012-13.pdf but if you are interested only in the results they are in the table below…

But please keep in mind two important notes:
1) don’t think or assume it’s all about the skills of people involved because randomness plays a part here… and it’s hard for the better example than Minnesota Timberwolves in 2012-13. Literally everybody thought they would be better this season but they were crushed by injuries and in the end the best prediction for this team turned out to be from… last years’ adjusted wins! So if someone predicted 45 wins for them his result was punished by bad luck more than someone who predicted 35 wins for them.
Well, unless someone can predict injuries…

2) in most cases entries next to each other are basically interchangeable in terms of accuracy because difference between them can be translated into “2-3 more/less wins in the right direction would flip them”.

Onto the table…