I generally like 538's CARMELO ratings to some degree. As I wrote on page 1, I know they aren't perfect as this is an insanely difficult task to begin with. I still appreciate this quantification being attempted, as long as it should be understood to have some degree of inaccuracy as much predictive modeling often does, and I'm intrigued as to see how the model improves over time as more seasons of data get fed into it. As for now, it just gives us
something and something that is fairly objective rather than having fan bias built in.
A few weeks ago I was looking at last season's CARMELO ratings for Kemba and Kyrie and found Kemba to be slightly higher projected than Kyrie, which surprised me. That along with other factors got me thinking about writing a post about looking into if Kemba is as good as Kyrie in a vacuum, which I never did.
Turns out in this year's edition, Kemba's 5 year projection is slightly higher than Kyrie's as well. Also he is the rated the #1 best bargain of this season's free agency class (
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-nba-free-agents-got-paid-too-much-and-too-little/). I have to disagree terribly with that as it clearly underrates Kawhi. It seems Kawhi's lack of games played in the regular season drives down his WAR though (4.6 reg season, 14.9 postseason last season), so maybe we'll all be pleasantly surprised in how much of an impact Kemba has here.