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
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
The NFL has clearly turned to a pass-first league during the past decade or so, and for a good reason. Passing is overall more efficient! Indeed using play-by-play data from the 2014-2016 NFL seasons and the Winston-Sagarin-Cabot model for expected points, a passing play adds on average 0.25 expected points, while a rushing play adds… Read More Skill Curves in the NFL: Unlocking the Interactions between Passing & Rushing
If the regular season serves as an indicator for what we will see in the playofss, we are certainly in for a treat! With the playoffs for the Basketball Champions League right around the corner, we make our predictions – that will keep being updated as the playoffs progress. First we start with the final… Read More Basketball Champions League Predictions: Playoffs 2017-18
Shooting charts have been an integral part of a basketball game’s summary for quiet some time now. Fans like visual information and can easily grasp it. However, if one wants to understand the shooting patterns of teams/players and how they differ (and how potentially this can drive pre-game scouting and in-game strategy) heuristic comparison of… Read More A Shooting Dictionary for Players and Teams in Basketball Champions League
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… Read More Projecting the Euroleague Playoffs: The Elo Rating System
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… Read More Wins Contributed by NBA Players
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… Read More NBA Playoffs: The Champion as seen by the data
In the first part of our dealing with in-game probabilities we made some general comments about issues (or not) with these models. One of the problems with existing models is that they are not open, i.e., very little is known about their mechanics. Here I will present the details and the evaluation of a simple, yet… Read More In-game win probabilities Part 2: iWinrNFL
This year FIBA launched a new European professional competition for basketball clubs, namely, Basketball Champions League (BCL). A total of 52 teams from 31 European leagues participated in the inaugural season of BCL and the actual format of the competition can be found on the league’s site. Currently the competition is at the first round… Read More Predicting the Basketball Champions League Tournament using Data
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