With the 2015-16 NBA season getting underway tonight, we take a look at previous year data and attempt to extrapolate an expected number of wins for each team this season. The method we propose is conservative in that we rely on previous season possession data and opening day rosters for each NBA team. First, we…
With the 2015-16 NBA regular season slated to open on October 27th, just a mere ten days away, we figured to take a look at possession data from seasons past. An NBA possession is effectively the time that an offense gains possession of the basketball until the time the ceases to maintain possesion. There are…
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…
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,…
Shot charts have been used for decades, used to identify locations where players make field goals and to identify locations where players give up field goals. Decades ago, each player has their own chart with four quarters. Typically if a field goal is made, the player has a ‘o’ is placed on the relative location on…
Almost every NBA game is played as a game of runs, with teams either piecing together five to ten point runs or going scoreless for a couple minutes at a time. To identify the scoring pace of a team, we can take a look at a simple measurement: the Score Flow. Score flows are popular…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 