Categories
Basketball Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics NBA NBA Finals NBA Playoffs Sports Statistics

How to Beat the Golden State Warriors

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 […]

Categories
Basketball Data Analytics Data Science NBA NBA Finals Sports Statistics

Game 2 of CLE vs GSW Breakdown

As usual, here is the post-game breakdown of Game 2 of the NBA Finals between Cleveland and Golden State. Using my live-tracking app to track the relevant factors (as explained in previous posts) here are the live-captured time series: Computing the correlations between each time series above and the Golden State Warriors point difference, we […]

Categories
Basketball Data Analytics Data Science NBA Sports Statistics

Analyzing Stephen Curry’s Play

As a long-time Golden State Warriors fan (go Tim Hardaway and Chris Mullin!), I have been watching the Warriors this season with great interest.  Stephen Curry has been getting a lot of attention. It is somewhat of a foregone conclusion that he will be the MVP this season, but, I am not completely convinced, in […]

Categories
Basketball Chicago Bulls Data Analytics Data Science education Mathematics NBA NBA Finals NBA Playoffs Sports Statistics Toronto

The Three-Point Shot Delusion

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 […]

Categories
Basketball Chicago Bulls Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics NBA NBA Finals NBA Playoffs Science Sports Statistics

Ranking NBA Championship Teams

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 […]

Categories
Basketball Chicago Bulls Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics NBA NBA Finals NBA Playoffs Science Sports Statistics

The “Evolution” of the 3-Point Shot in The NBA

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 […]

Categories
Basketball Chicago Bulls Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics NBA NBA Finals NBA Playoffs Physics Sports Statistics

Article on Three-Point Shooting in the Modern-Day NBA

  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!     

Categories
Basketball Data Analytics Data Science Mathematics Sports Statistics

An Analysis of The 2015 NBA Finals Matchup

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 […]

Categories
Basketball Data Analytics Data Science

Three-Point Shooting Teams and The 2014-2015 NBA Playoffs

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 […]