We’re in the dog days of the offseason, but training camp looms. That means I’m working on my preseason forecast, which means I’m digging into The Statistical Doppelgänger Machine.
The Doppelgänger Machine works by comparing a player’s performance across 14 different categories that include age, playing time, pace-neutral box score stats and scores from my PPA metric. All that’s rolled up into a single score that (in theory) provides a list of NBA players since 1977-78 with similar production at a similar age.
I put The Machine together in part as a reaction to the standard way of talking about similar players, which was usually based on superficial characteristics like race, height and nationality.