About and method

CBB Deep Dive goes deep on two teams, Duke and NC State men's basketball, almost entirely from box-score data. It's built for fans who want the rotation and role picture in detail and for anyone who just wants a quick read on what to expect from each player.

How it updates

The morning after each game, the official box score is read and each player's line (start, minutes, points, shooting, rebounds, assists, turnovers) is recorded by hand. The site then rebuilds: averages, trend arrows, flags, projection pace and game notes are all computed automatically from those numbers. Nothing in a game note is written by hand.

What the numbers mean

• Averages are per game played. Last 3 is the average of a player's last three games played.
• Trend arrows appear when the last-3 minutes average is 3+ minutes above or below the full average.
• Flags: 8+ minute swings from the previous game, season highs and lows (once there are 3+ games), first starts, and regulars who drop under 5 minutes or don't play.
• Exhibitions are labeled everywhere, compared only with other exhibitions, and never count toward projection grades.
• Starter projections are the site's own preseason scoring numbers. Errors are absolute differences between projected and actual averages.
• What fans are saying on X, on game pages, is an automated summary of a sample of public posts from about two hours before tip-off to a day after. Spam, betting accounts, abusive posts and posts aimed at players personally are filtered out. It links to posts and paraphrases them; it doesn't reproduce them.

Crowd predictions: rounds and scoring

• Rounds. Readers predict each player's season scoring average (PPG) on each team's predict page. Round 1 closes at tip-off of the opener. After every regular-season game, once its box score is entered, the next round opens; it closes at tip-off of the following game. You can update your numbers as often as you like while a round is open; your latest entry in that round counts.
• What a round is graded on. Only the games played after the round closed. For each player you predicted, your pick is compared with his scoring average over those games (per game played). So a late entry has no head start: Round 5 entries are graded on games 5 onward, Round 1 entries on every game. A player who hasn't played since the round closed isn't graded yet. Grades update after every game, all season.
• Avg miss (how the leaderboard is ranked). For each player you picked, the miss is the gap in PPG between your pick and his actual scoring average over the graded games. Your avg miss is the average of those gaps; lower is better. The "Latest" leaderboard ranks the most recent graded round by avg miss. Ties go to whoever picked more players. To be ranked you need to pick at least 8 players in that round; entries with fewer are listed under the table.
• Season leaderboard. Your season avg miss is the average across all your graded picks, in every round you entered. You're ranked once your picks have been scored on at least 3 games and you've picked at least 8 different players; until then you're listed under the table.
• Points and bonus (shown on each result page and used for badges, not for ranking). Accuracy points per player: max(0, 10 − 2 × miss), so exactly right = 10 points and 5 PPG off or more = 0. Bold-call bonus: if you're within 1.5 PPG and your pick was more than 2 PPG away from that round's crowd average, you get +1 point for each PPG beyond 2, up to +5: min(5, |pick − crowd average| − 2). Only counts when at least 5 people predicted that player in the round.
• Closer than the starter projection. For each player with a starter projection, this counts whether your pick was closer than the starter projection to his actual average over the same games. Higher or lower doesn't matter, only how close. Example: if the starter projection is 14.5 and the player averages 12.0, a pick of 13.0 is closer (off by 1.0 vs. 2.5); a pick of 18.0 is not (off by 6.0).
• Badges (kept to three): streak for being closer than the starter projection on more than half your players in 2+ consecutive rounds; within 0.5 for a pick within 0.5 PPG of a player's average after 3+ games; first to spot for the earliest entry calling a role change, meaning a player 4+ PPG off his starter projection after 3+ games, with a pick 3+ PPG off the starter projection in the same direction and within 2 PPG of his average.
• Result cards. Each entrant gets a shareable card for every graded round. It's just for fun; there's nothing to win.

Sources and credits

• Box scores: official box scores on goduke.com (Duke) and gopack.com (NC State). Every game page links to its box score. Stats are recorded by hand; nothing is scraped and no page content, photos or logos are copied.
• Further reading: for national, all-teams ratings and analytics, see Bart Torvik (T-Rank), KenPom and EvanMiya. Their work is their own and isn't reproduced here.
• Game facts such as scores, minutes and points are facts. Analysis, flags and projections on this site are original.

Independence

CBB Deep Dive is an independent fan project. It isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Duke University, Duke Athletics, NC State University, NC State Athletics, the Atlantic Coast Conference or the NCAA. Team and player names are used only to identify the subject of the analysis. No school logos or marks are used.

Privacy

• Crowd predictions need no account, no password and no email address. Your browser keeps a random private code in its local storage that ties your entries together; the site stores only a SHA-256 hash of it. The optional display name, your predictions and your scores are public.
• To use another device, the predict page gives you a restore link with your code after the # (that part of a link is never sent to a server). The text, email, copy and share buttons all work on your own device; nothing passes through this site and no email address is collected. A lost code can't be recovered.
• Your IP address is never stored. A salted SHA-256 hash of it (for IPv6, of its network prefix) is kept with each entry, only to limit repeat submissions.
• No ads, no tracking scripts and no cookies are set by this site.

Duke: 3 games recorded · NC State: 2 games recorded.