While Yours Truly isn’t nearly ready to announce his NBA forecast for 2017-18, others aren’t so bashful. As my colleague Chris McKee has already noted, the Toronto Raptors are forecast by ESPN (using a pixie-dust formula called RPM, or Real Plus-Minus) to win 43.4 games. The large drop from last year is being attributed to the departure of Patrick Patterson.
All right, so RPM isn’t that bad, as synthetic statistics go. I’m a believer in plus-minus data, and Patrick Patterson has been a leader in that department since he arrived in Toronto.