Forecasting player performance: assists
Let's try this again. The first draft of this post was erased when Blogger assumed that Ctrl-Z meant "select all, delete, save" rather than the more standard "undo". Anyway, after a few choice words were screamed at any - and all - inanimate objects in sight, the end result is probably positive for you, the reader, as the second time round is often more concise with less - though still considerable amounts of - needless waffle. We started this series with some tentative steps into forecasting individual player data by looking at goals , and the presumption that we surely do better than "he looks in form" or has an "easy" opponent this week. This post on predicting assists is going to follow a similar path, though we will find a couple of different issues along the way that will need to be expanded on in future posts. Before we get too deep, we need to throw out a quick caveat and acknowledge the proverbial elephant: the definition an...