In a recent game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Detroit Pistons, the Bucks employed their typical switch, slip, and show match-up zone defense to clog the paint and swat shooters off the perimeter en route to a 115-105 victory. The methodology is fairly straight forward: On the perimeter, try to slips guards and drop…
When we break down different types of actions on the court, we tend to look at play-by-play as a guide to understanding the play types. The most common break down we see is the shot type for a field goal attempt. From there, we have recently tended to discuss the differences between Klay Thompson and…
In a fairly comical article back in February 2018, Bleacher Report identified the League’s Least Valuable Shooters. In this article, Adam Fromal examined players around the league by extracting their field goal percentage from four particular zones on the court: 3-10 feet, 11-16 feet, 17′-3pt, and 3PA. Fromal would then calculate each player’s points per…
Suppose a game completes and three players post the following stat lines: Player A: 31 points, 13 rebounds, 3 assists Player B: 20 points, 11 rebounds, 9 assists Player C: 20 points, 21 rebounds, 0 assists Frequently, we ask who was the better player or which player contributed the most to the game. Unfortunately, most…
On December 31st, James Harden dropped yet another 40+ points triple double on the Memphis Grizzlies in a 113 – 101 victory in Houston. It wasn’t the 43 points, 10 rebounds, and 13 assists that was the most impressive stat of the night, but rather the fact that Harden scored 43 points to spite making…
With the new year coming up, we will be posting our NCAA Rankings based on single-season, non-prior induced, metrics for predicting who should make the NCAA tournament. Every year, we typically score between 65 and 68 teams correct; last year being a bust with 64 teams. As a side note, three of the four missed…
Once of the core applications for tracking data is the ability to apply machine learning to gain insight into player tendencies. Unfortunately, due to small samples, we cannot simply measure a particular player’s track paths and say “this player tends to do x.” Instead, we must adopt methods that lift information off a player and…
