This should be a basic question and I'm embarassed to not know the answer (and for unsuccesfully Googling it), but - how does one perform a year-to-year correlation? I'm doing a lot of my own research, creating my own custom stats, etc. My best thought is to run a series of a stat compared to the next season and average those values (ie, series 1 is 1990, 1991, 1992, etc and series 2 is 1991, 1992, 1993, etc). Is this the right approach? Or is there a more formal way to do this (I suspect there is). Alternatively I could correlate all values for each season (every player/team/etc) to the next season, and repeat for each pair of consecutive seasons, and then average?

Anyhow, obviously I am a bit confused and would love to be pointed in the right direction.

Thanks a bunch!