Three weeks ago, the Houston Astros (73-60) sat relatively comfortably atop the American League West with a three game lead over the Texas Rangers (69-62) and a 6.5 game lead over the Los Angeles Angels (66-66). Over the course of three weeks, the Rangers wrangled the division lead in a convincing series over the Astros.…
As the season comes to a conclusion, we will continue to produce probabilities for each MLB making the playoffs. With 10-12 games remaining for each team, the need for urgency arises and teams outside the playoff picture need to start posting near perfect records (Rockies of 2007); or teams inside the playoff picture need to…
Recently, Dikembe Mutombo, Jo Jo White, and Spencer Haywood were inducted as players into the NBA Hall of Fame. Mutombo, an eight-time NBA All-Star and four-time Defensive Player of the Year, is the second all-time in blocks; playing in the NBA from 1991 through 2009. White, a seven-time NBA All-Star and two-time NBA champion, set…
In our recent post, Predicting MLB Playoff Probabilities, we addressed a simple method for estimating the probabilities for each MLB team using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo using historical results from earlier in the season. We introduced the notion of continuity correction to help adjust for small sample sizes and a simple random number generator to…
ESPN recently updated their Hunt For October page and introduced probabilities for teams making the playoffs. While ESPN does not give a detailed analysis on how they obtain these simulations, we can instead create our own method. To do this, let’s take a simple approach: use past results of games and a little statistical machinery to build…
In 2013, it was reported that Madison, Wisconsin was one of the safest cities in the United States. In the FBI reports that help dictate the “safest cities” and “dangerous cities” lists, statistics on shootings, homicides, burglaries, rapes, assaults, and other various violent crime statistics are taken into consideration. Interest in these numbers typically stem from an…
In light of the continual chest-beating by the SEC against Ohio State’s schedule, we figured to take a moment to look at common methods for ranking teams from a mathematical viewpoint and gain insight on the impact of schedules. While we are accustomed to playoffs and all the drama that it brings to our everyday life,…
With the recent announcement that the NBA is changing the format of playoffs by seeding the playoffs based solely on records, we take a look at the complexity and reasoning for dividing out the 30 NBA teams into 6 divisions. For Major League Baseball and the National Football League, divisions serve a major role in scheduling. An…
Many fans of the NBA select their team based on one of four main criteria: they may have grown up in a household that was once within proximity of an NBA team; their favorite player has moved to a particular team; the team is has a history of being a winner; or they have some odd…
In our last post we saw that we can use a simple nonparametric statistical method, called the kernel density estimator, to build nice looking scoring charts. As we saw, these charts give a better idea of the distribution of the scorer when compared to the basic shooting chart used for several decades past. In this post,…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 