Similarity

One of the most fascinating, relatively new analysis methods for baseball players is judging players statistically against all players throughout the game's history and coming up with their most similar players. There's a couple of ways to go about it, the Baseball Prospectus runs theirs through a computer system called Pecota, and baseball-reference.com runs theirs through a system called "similarity scores". Pecota is based on projecting the future and similarity scores is based on what they've actually done so far. Well, as you might imagine, there is some ground breaking work being done on this front in basketball as well. If you'd like to know more about the method behind this madness, there's a link at the end of this that will explain it all. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at the current Blazers roster and where their similarity scores lie, note that these are most similar at age and based solely on past performance, not projecting what they will be:

Brandon Roy: Jason Richardson (Ray Allen & Paul Pierce make an appearance on his list)
LaMarcus Aldridge: Michael Doleac (yikes, see disclaimer below)
Travis Outlaw: Michael Doleac (this isn't exactly going as I had planned)
Martell Webster: Marvin Williams
Jarett Jack: Joe Dumars
Joel Przybilla: John Salley (apparently we've entered the Detroit Pistons part of the program)
Steve Blake: Pearl Washington
James Jones: Kenny Walker (of former slam dunk champ fame)
Raef LaFrentz: Herb Williams (no idea)
Sergio Rodriguez: apparently not enough data
Channing Frye: Sharone Wright (and Michael Doleac making an appearance at #2)

Grain of Salt Disclaimer: Each of these contain 10 most similar players, I'm just putting out the #1 guy on the list. For example, LaMarcus also has Al Jefferson, Chaz Villanueva, and Vlade Divac on his. Basically for the younger guys it has a really wide range that could go either way. It would also appear that when they have a wide range they always throw Michael Doleac on there. He's got to be the most comparable player in the league just looking at this small sample size.

Overall, not all that surprising, a lot of young players that could still go either way but there's some real promise there. That's kind of the "firm grasp of the obvious" way to look at it. Then there's the Greg Oden factor. As we all know, he changes everything. The link explaining similarity scores is listed below.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/similar.html