By: Dr. Ikjyot Singh Kohli It seems that one cannot turn on ESPN or any YouTube channel nowadays without the ongoing debate of whether Michael Jordan is better than Lebron, what would happen if Michael Jordan played in today’s NBA, etc… However, I have not seen a single scientific approach to this question. Albeit, it […]
Category: NBA Finals
By: Dr. Ikjyot Singh Kohli The Golden State Warriors have posed quite the conundrum for opposing teams. They are quick, have a spectacular ability to move the ball, and play suffocating defense. Given their play in the playoffs thus far, all of these points have been exemplified even more to the point where it seems […]
It was pointed out to me recently that a few of the articles I have written describing the detailed geometric structure behind the triangle offense is scattered in various places around my blog, so here is a list of the articles in one convenient place: The Mathematics of Filling the Triangle (First article) Group Theory and […]
I have now made a significant update to my applied machine learning paper on predicting patterns among NBA playoff and championship teams, which can be accessed here: arXiv Link .
In a previous post, I described the most optimal offensive strategy for the Knicks based on developing relevant joint probability density functions. In this post, I attempt a solution to the following problem: Given 5 players on the court, how can one determine (x,y) coordinates for each player such that the spacing / distance between each […]
In a previous article, I showed how one could use data in combination with advanced probability techniques to determine the optimal shot / court positions for LeBron James. I decided to use this algorithm on the Knicks’ starting 5, and obtained the following joint probability density contour plots: One sees that the Knicks offensive strategy […]
Where is Lebron James most effective on the court? Based on 2015-2016 data, we obtained from NBA.com the following data which tracks Lebron’s FG% based on defender distance: From Basketball-Reference.com, we then obtained data of Lebron’s FG% based on his shot distance from the basket: Based on this data, we generated tens of thousands of […]
In this article, I will use Data Science / Machine Learning methodologies to break down the real factors separating the playoff from non-playoff teams. In particular, I used the data from Basketball-Reference.com to associate 44 predictor variables which each team: “FG” “FGA” “FG.” “X3P” “X3PA” “X3P.” “X2P” “X2PA” “X2P.” “FT” “FTA” “FT.” “ORB” “DRB” “TRB” […]
I was thinking about how one can use the NBA’s new SportVU system to figure out optimal positions for players on the court. One of the interesting things about the SportVU system is that it tracks player coordinates on the court. Presumably, it also keeps track of whether or not a player located at makes […]
Everyone by now knows about this paper I wrote a few months ago: http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05266 Using data science / machine learning methodologies, it basically showed that the most important factors in characterizing a team’s playoff eligibility are the opponent field goal percentage and the opponent points per game. This seems to suggest that defensive factors as […]
