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…
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…
In a previous post, we took a look into some spatio-temporal data obtained through SportVU technology for the NBA and identified how to use that data to perform basic tasks such as building convex hulls to illustrate offense and defense coverage on a court; as well as provide basic Python code for the reader to…
A couple years ago, an article by Bill James on ‘How Safe a College Basketball Lead’ is given a point differential between two NCAA basketball teams was published. This article identified a method for estimating the number of seconds a lead is safe. The algorithm is given as follows: Take the differential and subtract three points. If…
With the Golden State Warriors and Memphis Grizzlies are set to square off for the second time this season tonight, we take an extended look at the most recent 119 – 69 Warrior win over the Grizzlies on November 2nd. We do this by looking at two consecutive possessions that resulted in a Warriors basket and a…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 