1979 – 1980 NBA RAPM

From my video library of past games, I have been slowly reconstructing NBA Stint Data for several seasons prior to the 1996 Season’s start of the Play-By-Play era of statistics tracking of NBA games. This is a lengthy effort in trying to give some insight to interactions between players, at least from a stint level.…

Approximating Curves I: Mechanical Process

Now that the 2019-2020 season has ended, let’s take a quick look at something almost every data scientist knows: polynomial projection. Now, if you’re a data scientist and find yourself mumbling, “I’ve never heard of that,” don’t worry: You have. Over the next few posts, we are going to discuss a larger problem of approximating…

Offensive Crashing

Back in high school, it behooved our team to “keep one man back” on offense. The thought process was simple, if the defense were able to get out into transition, our team would at least impede their progress towards the basket with the hopes of them settling into the half-court offense. Sometimes it worked. In…

Exercising Error: Quantifying Statistical Tests Under RAPM (Part IV)

In the Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) model, one of the perceived challenges is understanding the error associated with the resulting posterior RAPM value a player receives. In a previous post, we noted that RAPM is a Bayesian model in which we assume that “player contribution” can be estimated through weighted offensive ratings conditioned on the…