Freshmen Similarity: Projecting the ACC

Ken Pomeroy recently announced that his site (kenpom.com) would be shifting to a subscription model. I'm surprised he held out as long as he did. Kenpom is a goldmine of basketball data, and his blog is where a lot of us were introduced to tempo-free stats. And for that introduction, I am forever grateful. Outside of coaching, nothing has expanded my understanding of the game more than learning to appreciate tempo-free analysis. His blog will still be free, as will the front page which shows the national ratings. It's just that you won't be able to mine individual players and coaches without spending $20 a year. That, of course, is a no-brainer. The metric I'm mining today is Similarity. Essentially, the similarity score is derived by examining players of the same eligibility class, and finding the ones who are most statistically similar. Some stats carry more weight than others, but in total 13 statistical categories are used. One advantage for this method is that...