Ranking and rating teams has been one of the major tasks in the sports analytics community. One of the most elegant approaches I have seen is the one presented by W. Winston in his book “Mathletics“. In this post I will adopt the general approach presented and add a few elements more. Our case study […]
Clock management is certainly a crucial task that the personnel of an NFL team has to work on and be prepared for. However, it should be obvious even to the casual fan that the teams are all using pretty much the same guidelines for clock management. In this article, I am not going to judge these guidelines […]
What attributes explain a team’s win-loss performance? Of course this is the holy grail of sports (hoops) analytics, since knowing the answer to this question will allow a team to create a plan that will exploit this knowledge. The famous 4 factors from Dean Oliver are one such example, where a small number of statistics […]
How long should a playoff series be? This is a question that involves different dimensions ranging from practical/logistics (e.g., traveling, length of the series etc.) to ones related with the league objective (e.g., notion of “fairness”, value of upsets etc.). In this blog post I will make an attempt to show some of the tradeoffs […]
I have been wanting to make my projections for the Euroleague for a long time now but unfortunately I have not been able to find a good data source for the input data required from our Basketball Prediction Matchup engine. So I decided to use the Elo rating to make my projections. The Elo rating […]
If you are reading this post most probably you know that a lot of work has been done in developing advanced metrics for evaluating players. The objective of all these metrics is to try an quantify the impact of each player in winning. There are metrics such as win shares, wins over replacement etc. that […]
With the NBA playoffs right around the corner we crunched the numbers in order to give you the 2016-17 champion today! Of course we are joking since numbers do not play basketball but we simulated the 2016-17 playoffs and we obtained the championship probabilities for each of the 16 teams in the playoffs. We used the Basketball […]
