Duke's Allen, Notre Dame's Beachem lead top projected breakout scorers
As the 2015-16 season nears, SI is revealing its player projections, conference forecasts and national rankings. These are derived from our statistical projection system, a collaboration between economist Dan Hanner and SI's Luke Winn and Chris Johnson that's now in its second year.
We used our projection model to generate individual stats for every player in each of the top 11 conferences. The individual projections are based on many factors: players' past advanced-statistical performance in the context of more than a decade of D-I player data; the predictive power of recruiting ratings, both on immediate freshman performance and longer-term development; coaches' abilities to develop and maximize talent, as well as their playing-time distribution tendencies; teams' estimated pace of play; and intel from teams on how their rotations will be structured, which helps us better forecast how many minutes and shots will be available to each player.
The sixth reveal of SI's projection-system output is the top 50 breakout scorers, according to increase in points per game between last season and '15-16: