Related papers: The Advantage of Playing Home in NBA: Microscopic,…
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…
Box score statistics are the baseline measures of performance for National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball. Between the 2011-2012 and 2015-2016 seasons, NCAA teams performed better at home compared to on the road in nearly…
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,…
We present evidence, based on play-by-play data from all 6087 games from the 2006/07--2009/10 seasons of the National Basketball Association (NBA), that basketball scoring is well described by a weakly-biased continuous-time random walk.…
Box score statistics in the National Basketball Association are used to measure and evaluate player performance. Some of these statistics are subjective in nature and since box score statistics are recorded by scorekeepers hired by the home…
The 2020 NBA playoffs were played inside of a bubble in Disney World because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant that there were no fans in attendance, games played on neutral courts and no traveling for teams, which in theory removes…
In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal…
Implicit biases occur automatically and unintentionally and are particularly present when we have to make split second decisions. One such situations appears in refereeing, where referees have to make an instantaneous decision on a…
In this paper, we employ machine learning techniques to analyze seventeen seasons (1999-2000 to 2015-2016) of NBA regular season data from every team to determine the common characteristics among NBA playoff teams. Each team was…
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…
Traditional NBA player evaluation metrics are based on scoring differential or some pace-adjusted linear combination of box score statistics like points, rebounds, assists, etc. These measures treat performances with the outcome of the game…
We estimate the effect of playing in one's home country in professional squash using a Bayesian hierarchical model applied to men's and women's Professional Squash Association matches from 2018-2024. The model incorporates players' world…
We analyze how coaching strategies affect goal difference and home win probabilities using hand-coded Serie A match commentary (2011/12--2013/14). Our dataset captures in-game dynamics, referee actions, and team behavior. Applying…
Many popular sports involve matches between two teams or players where each team have the possibility of scoring points throughout the match. While the overall match winner and result is interesting, it conveys little information about the…
In this paper, we present a new model for ranking sports teams. Our model uses all scoring data from all games to produce a functional rating by the method of least squares. The functional rating can be interpreted as a teams average point…
Two new Bayesian methods for estimating and predicting in-game home team win probabilities are proposed. The first method has a prior that adjusts as a function of lead differential and time elapsed. The second is an adjusted version of the…
Even though it might have taken some time, the three-point line ultimately changed the way the game is played as evidenced by the increase in the three-point shot attempts over the years. However, during the last few years we have…
In the National Basketball Association (NBA), teams must make choices about which players to acquire, how much to pay them, and other decisions that are fundamentally dependent on player effectiveness. Thus, there is great interest in…
Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different sports. Using a comprehensive data set of…
Existing approaches for estimating home-field advantage (HFA) include modeling the difference between home and away scores as a function of the difference between home and away team ratings that are treated either as fixed or random…