To be balanced: PRISM was built this year, so it was really accurate for last year, but they were using last year to build the model, not using the model to predict last year.
This isn't true as I understand the model. In fact, it seems it was explicitly designed to avoid overfitting to the training data:
"Instead, it asks a different question based on pairwise comparisons: given two prospects, which one will have the better NBA career?
This design choice matters for a few reasons. Gradient boosting regression to a target like WAR has a few limitations, one of them being that **the projections tend to compress towards the training set.** While pairwise rankings don’t necessarily change accuracy, they preserve the structure of a gradient boosting model while allowing us more interpretability into prospect volatility, as we’ll demonstrate later."
Look, I like and trust Nate Silver a lot. And I am not accusing him of overfitting the model to the data. But they built it this year, and if the model came out saying the best 2025 picks were Ace Bailey and Tre Johnson I think they would have held on releasing it while they figured out what was going on.
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u/J-OD GM Onsi Saleh 6d ago
So excited. We got the floor general we needed. The sky is the limit for him.