In 2004, Dean Oliver expanded upon his “Four Factors” philosophy from his 2002 book, Basketball on Paper, in an attempt to identify how four important strategies relate to success in basketball. These strategies are nothing new, as these were drilled into my head from coaches dating back to the early 90’s. The novelty of understanding…
In our previous post we tackled, at length, how John Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is calculated and identified how different aspects of a player’s game is weighted. This leads us to question certain components of PER. Should I prefer a scorer or a rebounder? How do these terms interact? What about team affiliation? In…
Warning: Lots of Math Ahead… With the introduction of Player Efficiency Rating (PER), John Hollinger constructed a methodology for comparing the relative accomplishments of players across leagues, as well as across years. While being commonly viewed as complex and unidentifiable, the idea is relatively simple: produce a value for each player such that it captures their personal…
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…
With the highest return for a field goal attempt per possession being a three point field goal, teams have caught on that three point field goals are the optimal way to go on offense provided they have consistently accurate shooters from that range. This qualifier has been the difficult part of the three point equation.…
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…
Pop Quiz: Who are the top ten rebounders in the NBA for the 2016-17 NBA Season? If you said… Andre Drummond DeAndre Jordan Hassan Whiteside Rudy Gobert Karl-Anthony Towns Dwight Howard Anthony Davis Russell Westbrook Marcin Gortat DeMarcus Cousins … you might be right. These are the players that have the most rebounds for the…
A common methodology for NBA analysts to develop a metric that quantifies scoring ability of a player through the position a player is put in when taking a shot, and the association of a closest defender when the shot is taken. Some such metrics are kernel density plots of field goal percentages on the court, assist adjacency matrices, measure…
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…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 