The first thing to note is that just by looking at Basketball-Reference.com there are 62 factors that uniquely classify a team: MP FG FGA FG% 3P 3PA 3P% 2P 2PA 2P% FT FTA FT% ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV PF PTS OMP OFG OFGA OFG% O3P O3PA O3P% O2P O2PA O2P% OFT OFTA […]
Category: Data Science
The 2015-2016 NBA season is dawning upon us, and as usual, ESPN has been doing their usual #NBArank, where they are ranking players based on the following non-rigorous methodology: We asked, “Which player will be better in 2015-16?” To decide, voters had to consider both the quality and quantity of each player’s contributions to his […]
Tomorrow is the date of the Canadian Federal Elections. Here are my predictions for the outcome: That is, I predict the Liberals will win, with the NDP trailing very far behind either party.
The purpose of this post is to determine whether basketball teams who choose to employ an offensive strategy that involves predominantly shooting three point shots is stable and optimal. We employ a game-theoretical approach using techniques from dynamical systems theory to show that taking more three point shots to a point where an offensive strategy […]
Continuing the debate of the value of three-point shooting in today’s NBA, my article analyzing this issue from a mathematical perspective has now been published on the arXiv, check it out!
Howard Beck had an interesting article today on Bleacher Report, basically suggesting that the NBA finals, in particular, the current style of play embodied by The Golden State Warriors is somehow a vindication of D’Antoni’s basketball philosophies: “Shoot a lot of threes”, “Shoot in 7 seconds or less”, “Play small lineups”, etc… While the Warriors have […]
The NBA finals are exactly five days away, and I wanted to present an analysis breaking down the matchup between The Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers. I used machine and statistical learning techniques to generate the most probable scenarios for the outcome of each game, and this is what I found. Note that the probabilities […]
Major Update: June 22, 2015. I have now published a formal article on the arXiv proving many of the assertions made earlier in this blog post. It can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06687 Some controversy was stirred up today when Knicks President and Basketball coaching legend Phil Jackson made the following tweets regarding three-point shooting teams […]
Relativity Digest 