The vast majority of NBA analysts claim today that the NBA has changed. It has become more fast-paced, and there is a significantly greater emphasis on teams attempting more three point shots. The evidence for this is the repeated recital of the fact that over the last number of years, the average three-point attempt rate […]
Category: Statistics
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 […]
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!
The purpose of this post is to demonstrate some very beautiful (I think!) mathematics that arises form Darwinian evolutionary theory. It is a real shame that most courses and discussions dealing with evolution never introduce any type of mathematical formalism which is very strange, since at the most fundamental levels, evolution must also be governed by […]
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 […]
It is without question that the greatest team in NBA history was the 1995-1996 Chicago Bulls. They went 72-10 that year and went on to win the NBA Championship against a top-notch Seattle Supersonics team. Phil Jackson’s system and first-class coaching were the major reasons why the Bulls were so good, but I wanted […]
Relativity Digest 