In a recent post, we took a look at identifying how a team distributes the ball on offense with a deep dive look at the Brooklyn Nets. In that article we identified how to construct a community; the sets of likely passes for scores between players. This also included two-pass assists (hockey assists) where it…
A common question about identifying player tendencies on offense is to ask “how likely is this player to receive the ball during a possession?” This methodology can be aided by the quantity touches. However, a player can touch the ball with what I like to term as an empty touch. These are touches that have…
The calculation for Offensive Rating, another fruitful Dean Oliver metric, is simple: compute the number of points produced when a player is in the game per 100 possessions that the player is in the game. The computation is performed at a “per possession” rate and scaled out to 100. The challenge lies at being restricted…
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…
A possession is defined by the NBA as Section XVIII-Team Possession A team is in possession when a player is holding, dribbling or passing the ball. Team possession ends when the defensive team gains possession or there is a field goal attempt. There is a little change to that definition even, as a field goal…
Over the past couple decades, we have heard effectively the same complaint that the NBA’s Western Conference is simply too tough and that the Eastern Conference teams have it relatively easy. During the last decade, it’s the primary reason that people dismiss LeBron James’ run through seven consecutive NBA finals as a result of the…