It is this time of the year when pretty much everyone in college basketball is complaining. There are complaints for the importance of NCSOS, NET, or any other metric the committee uses to justify its decision for the teams to make the tournament. Even those that make it complain for their seeding. Everyone complaints. It… Read More College Hoops and March Madness
If you have not heard yet, the NBA will introduce for the first time an in-season tournament, which essentially tries to “copy” the national cups that European soccer leagues have (without however, adding new games for the teams – until the final). While you can find all the details here, the main point is that… Read More Upping the Ante at the NBA In-Season Tournament
Have you ever felt that a team after jumping to an early lead or even blowing out their opponent, they start playing worse? If yes, you are not alone, and also it turns out that this is not some sort of cognitive illusion of your mind, but rather it is a robust phenomenon. Jeremias Englemann… Read More Leading Effects in the NFL: A mixed effects model approach
DARKO, RPM, RAPTOR, CARMELO, PIMP, LEBRON and many others are just some of the player rating models that exist for the NBA. Unfortunately I have not managed to find similar player ratings for the WNBA (this does not mean they do not exist — I am not particularly known for my search skills either in… Read More A detailed guide for developing player ratings for WNBA (and other leagues)
I was looking yesterday at the play-by-play of game between Greece and Great Britain for the 2023 WC qualifiers and I noticed the following: Dorsey passed to Antetokounmpo and he drew a shooting foul. The moment he scored the second free throw, Dorsey was credited with an assist. I am not sure when FIBA started… Read More We need to start counting assists that lead to made free throws.
A usual question that comes up is how one can translate the performance of a team in their national league to an international one. E.g., if AEK Athens had a net rating of +10 in the Greek league (wishful thinking these days but one can only dream), how does this translate to Euroleague? Having this… Read More European Basketball Leagues Ranking: An optimization approach
While in the NBA you will rarely see a game’s stats sheet mention metrics like PER and PIR, this is quiet the norm for leagues around the world. In fact, these metrics are used to award game MVPs in these leagues – and as you can imagine many times the results are strange to say… Read More Single game player contribution metrics in basketball
Did high seeds got the bad end of the bubble deal in the NBA? Can we “recreate” the equivalent of home court in the bubble? These are some questions that I have seen quiet often being discussed in the media (social and traditional). There are also articles (like this one on ESPN’s site) that suggest… Read More Home Court Advantage, Team Ratings and Bayesian Regression
I have been thinking about this problem from an analytics persepctive since the beginning of the season, but the WSJ had recently an article that triggered some more thoughts. Here I am going to put some of my thoughts on the topic — bare with me because the thoughts will be rather unstructured at this… Read More Some (philosophical) thoughts on coach challenges
Yesterday the G-league announced that it will experiment with a new free throw rule in order to reduce the duration of the game. In particular, instead of awarding one, two or three free throws depending on the violation, it will award one free throw that will be worth one, two or three points respectively. Many… Read More Not all free throws are created equal anymore … at the G-League
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