The following page contains my 2025-26 season predictions for each NBA team, and my new LAKER Estimated RAPTOR player ratings. For more info about how it works, see below. Also check out all the updating forecasts here.
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This year’s NBA forecast introduces a new twist on traditional Elo — one that better reflects the different dynamics of the regular season and the playoffs.
Like before, the model maintains ratings for every team based on how they’ve performed and who they’ve played, adjusting for the quality of the opposition and home-court advantage. These ratings are converted into win probabilities for each game, and the rest of the season is simulated thousands of times to project standings and championship odds.
But instead of a rating based on rolling efficiency ratings, I now track two versions of Elo for every team — one tuned for the regular season and another for the playoffs.
The regular-season Elo evolves primarily based on regular-season games. It’s designed to reflect teams’ day-to-day form — the things that fluctuate across an 82-game grind, with all the scheduling, injuries and random swings that come with it. These ratings react a bit more quickly to new information, giving extra weight to recent games while still accounting for margin of victory and opponent strength.
The playoff Elo, meanwhile, updates more heavily from postseason games and moves more slowly during the regular season. This track captures a longer-term view of team quality — the kind that tends to matter in May and June, when rotations tighten and effort levels spike. It places more emphasis on playoff performance and continuity, rewarding teams that have proven themselves under postseason conditions.
The two systems also interact. Regular-season results slightly influence playoff ratings (and vice versa), so that each track informs the other without hurting their different purposes. Over time, this helps the model distinguish between teams that are built to thrive in the regular season versus those that are better suited for playoff basketball.
Each offseason, ratings are partially regressed toward the league average before the new season begins — reflecting that rosters change and teams rarely pick up exactly where they left off. I also blend in converted Elos via preseason odds (over/unders for regular-season Elo; title odds for the playoffs) Once the season starts, the dual Elo system quickly recalibrates based on new results.
As in past versions, the game-by-game win probabilities are fed into a Monte Carlo simulation that plays out the rest of the schedule thousands of times to estimate playoff odds, Finals probabilities and title chances for each team.
Limitations of the model
No model can perfectly capture how a team’s true strength evolves over a long season. This system focuses only on the scoreboard — who won, by how much, and where the game was played — and doesn’t yet account for lineup changes, trades or injuries in real time.
To help bridge that gap, my default Composite Mode blends the dual-track Elo projections with implied betting-market probabilities from FanDuel, which tend to reflect real-world adjustments for player availability and other contextual factors.
If you prefer to see how the numbers behave in isolation, the Stats-Only Mode removes those betting inputs, leaving a purely results-based forecast grounded in the dual-track Elo system.
This season, paid subscribers will have access to a constantly updating spreadsheet of LAKER and a variety of other advanced player metrics, plus historical team metrics, going back to the 1976 NBA-ABA merger — and team Elo rating season summaries for all of NBA history.
For an example of what is contained in this spreadsheet, see last year’s LAKER Estimated RAPTOR page. The link for this year’s sheet will be below the paywall after the season starts: