One of the simplest offensive plays in basketball is the pick and roll. The philosophy is relatively straightforward, a ball handler waits to receive a screen from a teammate and reacts accordingly. If the teammate establishes position, gets low and wide, and makes proper contact with the ball handler’s defender, then the defense is forced…
In 2004, Dean Oliver expanded upon his “Four Factors” philosophy from his 2002 book, Basketball on Paper, in an attempt to identify how four important strategies relate to success in basketball. These strategies are nothing new, as these were drilled into my head from coaches dating back to the early 90’s. The novelty of understanding…
In our previous post we tackled, at length, how John Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is calculated and identified how different aspects of a player’s game is weighted. This leads us to question certain components of PER. Should I prefer a scorer or a rebounder? How do these terms interact? What about team affiliation? In…
Warning: Lots of Math Ahead… With the introduction of Player Efficiency Rating (PER), John Hollinger constructed a methodology for comparing the relative accomplishments of players across leagues, as well as across years. While being commonly viewed as complex and unidentifiable, the idea is relatively simple: produce a value for each player such that it captures their personal…
Back in 2012, on the heels of my PhD in nonparametric Bayesian density estimation, I developed a methodology that constructs a nonparametric Bayesian density and teases out a nice spatio-temporal decomposition of movement on a space of interest. Pointing this at NBA SportVu data, the decomposition kindly identified player tendency in specific types of offenses…
With the highest return for a field goal attempt per possession being a three point field goal, teams have caught on that three point field goals are the optimal way to go on offense provided they have consistently accurate shooters from that range. This qualifier has been the difficult part of the three point equation.…
Here is an update on how safe an NBA lead is for the 2016-17 NBA Season. Last season, we found that the Bill James’ bound was violated twice in the 2015-16 NBA season. This year, the bound was violated one time: January 4th, 2017 by the Miami Heat against the Sacramento Kings. The same Sacramento…
Over the 2016-17 NBA regular season there were a total of 18950 steals. This amounted to roughly 15.4 steals per game; effectively 7.7 steals per team per game. Over the 236,547 possessions in the NBA last season, this amounted to 8.0111% of all possessions ending in a steal. Think about that for a second. Roughly…
Pop Quiz: Who are the top ten rebounders in the NBA for the 2016-17 NBA Season? If you said… Andre Drummond DeAndre Jordan Hassan Whiteside Rudy Gobert Karl-Anthony Towns Dwight Howard Anthony Davis Russell Westbrook Marcin Gortat DeMarcus Cousins … you might be right. These are the players that have the most rebounds for the…
A common methodology for NBA analysts to develop a metric that quantifies scoring ability of a player through the position a player is put in when taking a shot, and the association of a closest defender when the shot is taken. Some such metrics are kernel density plots of field goal percentages on the court, assist adjacency matrices, measure…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 