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D'Angelo Russell's potential rates ahead of Jahlil Okafor's according to new analytics rankings

Statistician Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight website focuses mostly advanced statistics and projections, and today they debuted a new metric for predicting the production of NBA players, dubbed "CARMELO." All the data used to calculate CARMELO is described here, but the statistic aims to "identify similar players throughout NBA history and use them to develop a probabilistic forecast of what a current NBA player's future might look like."

D'Angelo Russell's potential ceiling has been the most hotly debated topic among Los Angeles Lakers fans since the team decided to use the second overall selection in the 2015 NBA Draft to select the freshman point guard out of Ohio State ahead of Duke's Jahlil Okafor, whom many thought was the safer pick as well as a natural fit to be the Lakers' next great big man in a long line of productive seven-footers.