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With the NBA's adoption of in-game limb tracking in 2023, Sony's Hawk-Eye system now captures high-resolution, 3D poses of players and the ball 60 times per second. Linking these data to key events opens a new era in NBA analytics. Here, we…
There have been more hitting streaks in Major League Baseball than we would expect. All batting lines of MLB hitters from 1957-2006 were randomly permuted 10,000 times and the number of hitting streaks of each length from 2 to 100 was…
Basketball shooting coaches agree that smoother shooting motions are better, but there is less agreement about what "smooth" means quantitatively or what part of the shooting motion needs to be smooth. Using ball tracking data from the…
In this paper, we develop a logistic regression model to estimate the probability that a particular shot in an NHL game will result in a goal, and use the results to evaluate the performance of NHL skaters, goalies, and teams. We weight…
Understanding player shooting profiles is an essential part of basketball analysis: knowing where certain opposing players like to shoot from can help coaches neutralize offensive gameplans from their opponents; understanding where their…
In basketball, every time the offense produces a shot opportunity the player with the ball must decide whether the shot is worth taking. In this paper, I explore the question of when a team should shoot and when they should pass up the shot…
A commonly held opinion is that left-handed tennis players are overrepresented compared to the percentage of left-handers within the general population. This study provides the domain insights supported by data analysis that could help…
The prevailing belief propagated by NBA league observers is that the workload of the NBA season dramatically influences a player's performance$^{1,2,3,4,5}$. We offer an analysis of cross game player fatigue that calls into question the…
We propose a multidimensional tensor clustering approach for studying how professional basketball players' shooting patterns vary over court locations and game time. Unlike most existing methods that only study continuous-valued tensors or…
In this paper, we develop a novel depth-based testing procedure on spatial point processes to examine the difference in made and missed field goal attempts for NBA players. Specifically, our testing procedure can statistically detect 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…
Parameters of a shot of an ice hockey player are mostly determined by the capabilities of the player and the physical properties of the stick used. To reach better performance, every hockey player uses also a hockey tape for an adjustment…
We introduce a compact probabilistic model for two-player and two-team (four-player) squash matches, along with a practical skill-comparison rule derived from point-scoring probabilities. Using recorded shot types and court locations, we…
The National Basketball Association(NBA) has expanded their data gathering and have heavily invested in new technologies to gather advanced performance metrics on players. This expanded data set allows analysts to use unique performance…
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…
Basketball is often referred to as "a game of runs." We investigate the appropriateness of this claim using data from the full NBA 2016-17 season, comparing actual longest runs of scoring events to what long run theory predicts under the…
The game of Knockout is a classic playground game played with two basketballs. This paper uses a Markov process to analyze each player's probability of winning the game given their starting position in line and shooting percentages,…
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…
Increased data availability has stimulated the interest in studying sports prediction problems via analytical approaches; in particular, with machine learning and simulation. We characterize several models that have been proposed in the…
Basketball shot location data provide valuable summary information regarding players to coaches, sports analysts, fans, statisticians, as well as players themselves. Represented by spatial points, such data are naturally analyzed with…