Modelling different possibilities. You can take the numbers from any given game and change any element and have a fairly accurate understanding of how the game would have gone, with that change. Then you can take those updated results and apply them to the entire league. To a player's lifetime performance. To a team's performance throughout its entire time in being. You can make one day in the 1940s slightly more windy and understand how that would change the entire selection of teams as we know them in the present.
It's the closest most people are ever going to get to knowing what it would be like to make one little change in the past and watch the results cascade outward.
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It's the closest most people are ever going to get to knowing what it would be like to make one little change in the past and watch the results cascade outward.