As a kid growing up in the Los Angeles area, playing in AAU, the Nike leagues, and the Marmonte; we had a team that was a little ahead of its time: take three’s, switch everything, run teams into the ground by scoring before the defense was set, and force every opponent shot in the short…
A couple years ago, I presented an introduction to the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney nonparametric test with respect to identifying whether scoring was indeed increasing in the NBA. This was in 2015; and now that we are a few seasons along, we can start tracking the year-to-year trends. The reason for this popping up once again is primarily…
Over the last decade, the subtle changes from offenses revolving around mid-range jump shots to long-range three point attempts have become much more explicit as teams such as the Houston Rockets had come off a 2017-18 campaign launching over 50% of their field goal attempts from beyond the arc. The mathematics is simple: “3 >…
To take a break from the heavy mathematics of recent articles, today we take a look at the early offense set called Pistol. Like many offensive wrinkles such as elevator doors, floppy, horns (etc.), a key goal of the offense is to force the opposing defense to be out of position. More importantly, not only…
Over the past decade a true emphasis on three point shooting has emerged. This can be credited to the understanding of effective field goal percentage being a better underlying parameter for points per field goal attempt than raw field goal percentage. And it’s become an emphasis for some top-tier teams such as the Houston Rockets.…
A tried-but-true strategy in pick-up (and grade school) basketball is the “dump-and-chase” offense. This offense takes as many jumpers as possible, regardless of capability, fully knowing that the team can either out-hustle their opponent for rebounds; or they have a behemoth of a rebounder on their team. As players become older, or more technically sound…
In the era of tracking data, a need for a new style of analysis has emerged. Long gone are the regularized regression models and the simple counting techniques. Instead, we require leveraging shot-noise distributed systems such as Dan Cervone’s competing risks model, or Matthias Kempe’s self-organizing maps, or Peter Carr’s Imitation Learning. The list is…
When we learn about computational mathematics, software engineering, or data science in general, one of the most important questions we have to answer is how many operations are required. The answer isn’t to show the prowess of our algorithm, but rather identify how quickly the algorithm can perform. We need to know if the answer…
Recently, we posted about a way to redefine gravity in terms of a joint model that can be used to quantify defensive interaction, offensive spacing, and spatio-temporal motion of a possession. The result yields a sparse N x 2P x Q x R x S x Z tensor that characterizes the interactions of players, locations on the court,…
Back in 2014, STATS Inc. introduced the notion of gravity, which was explained by Kevin Pelton as a series of two measures: gravity score and distraction score. In Pelton’s explanation, gravity score measures the relative distance a primary defender strays from their offensive counterpart and distraction score quantifies the amount of attention that same defender…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 