Recalling my playing days in the NCAA, our coach would have us run two- and three-minute drills to replicate clutch scenarios. “Down five with two-minutes to go” would be the most common of these drills. Our top player, one practice, proclaimed that he should always get the ball because he’s the top scorer and “always…
In two days, we will find out who is the NBA MVP: James Harden, Kawhi Leonard, and Russell Westbrook. Each player has their pros and cons, and have been heavily debated over the past month since the finalists have been listed. Despite Leonard leading the Spurs into the second best record in the league (61-21)…
Now that the Finals are upon us (finally!), let’s take a look back at the Markov Chain simulator that we built for this post-season, evaluate how we did, and take a look at the NBA Finals! Round 1… 7 for 8 There were no surprises in the first round of the NBA Playoffs. In…
With the NBA Draft 22 days away, we would like to take a moment to show the impact of the previous 23 NBA Draft lotteries and show if whether draft position really truly matters. Hint: it does, but only to an extent. We’ll explain below. We focus on all draft picks since 1994, and not…
“The New York Knicks, with their first pick, select Patrick Ewing of Georgetown,” called out David Stern in the 1985 NBA draft. A draft that has since been heavily debated for three-plus decades as being the epitome of the NBA draft being “rigged” or fixed. Discussion about bent corners of envelopes, all the way to…
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…
In continuation of our Markov simulation of the NBA Playoffs, we take a look at the updated probabilities for each team remaining. In this article, we take a cursory look at each second round match up and see how the first round panned out compared to the probabilistic predictions. So Far So Good: All rounds…
With the NBA recently announcing the tie-breaking procedures, we finally obtain the draft orders up to the first three spots, decided by the lottery. That is, after the first three teams are selected, the remaining eleven spots of the draft lottery are in order of tie-broken winning percentages. If the Minnesota Timberwolves and the New…
With the NBA Playoffs set to get underway, we take a quick look at the probabilities for each team becoming the NBA Champions. Common consensus would place any combination of the five strongest teams: Golden State – Houston – San Antonio versus Cleveland – Boston. But the question is how likely? To answer that, we…
Now that the conference tournaments have wrapped up, we are left to identify who is in and who is out. Many analysts use RPI, gut feelings, and perceived “key wins” to help them identify a top 36 team “At-Large” seeding. Others such as Lunardi, Massey, and Colley, incorporate metrics observed based on wins, points, locations,…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 