Related papers: Realignment in the NHL, MLB, the NFL, and the NBA
In the four major North American professional sports (baseball, basketball, football, and hockey), the primary purpose of the regular season is to determine which teams most deserve to advance to the playoffs. Interestingly, while the…
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is actively considering the addition of two expansion teams, raising the question of how to restructure its conferences and divisions to balance travel efficiency, fairness, and revenue…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
In many professional sports leagues, teams from opposing leagues/conferences compete against one another, playing inter-league games. This is an example of a bipartite tournament. In this paper, we consider the problem of reducing the total…
The existence and justification to the home advantage -- the benefit a sports team receives when playing at home -- has been studied across sport. The majority of research on this topic is limited to individual leagues in short time frames,…
Scoring in a basketball game is a process highly dynamic and non-linear type. The level of NBA teams improve each season. They incorporate to their rosters the best players in the world. These and other mechanisms, make the scoring in the…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
Predicting the results of sport matches and competitions is an arising research field, benefiting from the growing amount of available data and the novel data analytics techniques. Excellent forecasts can be achieved by advanced machine…
In some domestic professional sports leagues, the home stadiums are located in cities connected by a common train line running in one direction. For these instances, we can incorporate this geographical information to determine optimal or…
Many sports leagues are played in a tightly scheduled round-robin format, leaving a limited time window to postpone matches. If the season cannot resume due to an external shock such as the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the ranking of the…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
League competition is investigated using random processes and scaling techniques. In our model, a weak team can upset a strong team with a fixed probability. Teams play an equal number of head-to-head matches and the team with the largest…
The bipartite traveling tournament problem (BTTP) addresses inter-league sports scheduling, which aims to design a feasible bipartite tournament between two $n$-team leagues under some constraints such that the total traveling distance of…
In recent years excessive monetization of football and professionalism among the players has been argued to have affected the quality of the match in different ways. On the one hand, playing football has become a high-income profession and…
We present a new problem called the incomplete Traveling Tournament problem, which introduces the well known Traveling Tournament Problem into the realm of incomplete round-robin tournaments. We focus on the case where teams can face each…
Constructing a suitable schedule for sports competitions is a crucial issue in sports scheduling. The round-robin tournament is a competition adopted in many professional sports. For most round-robin tournaments, it is considered…
Much of modern society is founded on orchestrating institutions that produce social goods by fostering motivated teams, pitting them against each other, and distributing the fruits of the arms races that ensue. However, even when the…