2009 Player Projections: Clemson, Duke, and Maryland

While none of these three teams has posted their updated roster yet, I wanted to get them up. Clemson should once again be one of the top teams in the league. Duke is Duke, etc. Maryland has some patches to fill in the frontcourt. The next task, of course, is to assimilate all of the individual projections into team ones, and that's a bit trickier. I'm currently working on a few different ways of doing this, but I'm not in love with any of them.

2009 Player Projections: UNC, VPI, and Wake

North Carolina is going to be silly good.

Virginia Tech's Jeff Allen should be a superstar in his sophomore season, but don't expect big breakouts from his four classmates who helped the Hokies to a surprising 9-win ACC season in 2008.

Wake Forest would have a solid 8-man rotation of returnees. Throw in three high-quality incoming freshmen and Dino Gaudio might have trouble finding enough minutes to go around, especially once Jamie Skeen returns to the team in December.

2009 Player Projections: BC, FSU, and Miami

Quick first impressions:

• Boston College: Whatever defense the Eagles have ever played has been predicated on having a shot blocker under the basket to make up for the matadors on the perimeter. With no player on the roster taller than 6'8", Al Skinner is going to have to come up with a new strategy.
  
• Florida State: Toney Douglas is the star, but the season will ride on how well the six freshmen play.
• Miami: Why is it that whenever a team exceeds artificially low expectations one year they're always wildly overrated the next? The Hurricanes have a solid roster and a very good coach, but there's no way they're a top-10 team.
  

2009 Player Projections: UVa, NCSU, and GT

I've uploaded the player projection reports for Georgia Tech (Mo Miller is poised for a breakout), N.C. State (the real Brandon Costner was the one we saw in 2007; Ben McCauley's great sophomore season looks like it was a fluke), and Virginia (a healthy Solomon Tat could be the Wahoos' best player). Boston College, Florida State, Miami, North Carolina, and Wake Forest have all posted their '08-'09 rosters on their official sites, so I'll have them up relatively soon.

There's a new section in the reports this year, and it's the key to the player comps. Each player-season in the database has been assigned these eight numbers, and each number represents a facet of the player's game:

• Size is height, with an adjustment for bulk using Body Mass Index (BMI). Skinny players tend to play shorter than their height, and bulky ones play taller. Each standard deviation of BMI adds or subtracts an inch from height.
• Physicality is Free Throw Attempts plus Personal Fouls, divided by 1 plus the ratio of 3-Point Attempts to Field Goal Attempts.
• Activity shows how often a player does something that shows up in the box score.
• Shooting is the average of: FT%; 3G% times 3GM, divided by 3; and 2G% times 2GM, divided by 8.
• Scoring is simply Points scored.
• Passing is Assists minus Turnovers.
  
• Rebounding is the number of Rebounds recorded.
• Defense is height-normalized Blocks plus Steals.

All the numbers used are per-40. Each category is then normalized to a 0-to-100 scale. The similarity scores are based on a combination of the correlation and the closeness of the two players' profiles. The projections based on the new system are about 25% tighter on average than the ones from a year ago.