Cross-league basketball player projection

What it does

• Projecting a player into another league.

  A player's numbers depend on where he produced them: moving up means bigger, faster defenders, moving down means more space. Player Projection translates a player's production in his current league into the destination league, stat by stat and per 40 minutes, adjusted for the role and minutes he would have there. Our analysts run it for one destination or several at once, to see where his production holds and where it drops, or to rank every eligible player from other leagues for a single destination, filtered by position, age, minutes and reliability grade.

• Why the range matters as much as the number.

  A single projected figure hides how uncertain it is. Every projected stat comes with a range from the 10th to the 90th percentile, so eight outcomes out of ten are expected to fall inside it, and with a confidence label. A wide range is information too: it tells the club how much is still unknown about that move. In a signing decision the low end of the range is often the useful figure, because it shows what the club gets if the move goes badly and whether the signing still makes sense then.

• Leagues without comparable public data.

  Much of the market plays in leagues with thin public data: second divisions, smaller domestic leagues, competitions few people in the room have watched. Our coverage spans 171 leagues and more than 150,000 players, so a candidate from any of them can be put on the same scale as a player the club already knows. That is where the projection matters most: when the only public record of a player is a box score.

• The questions it answers.

  What would this player produce in our league, in the role we have for him? Of the candidates on our list, whose production holds up best after the move? Where would his numbers hold, and where would they drop? And before there is a name on the table: what would the profile we need, set by hand, produce in our league?

• Inside an engagement.

  Player Projection is the tool our analysts use in client work, above all in roster construction and the transfer window. It is not sold as a separate product: what the club receives is the analysis, the shortlist and the argument behind it.