Related papers: Heating Up in NBA Free Throw Shooting
Data analytics in sports is crucial to evaluate the performance of single players and the whole team. The literature proposes a number of tools for both offence and defence scenarios. Data coming from tracking location of players, in this…
We develop a machine learning approach to represent and analyze the underlying spatial structure that governs shot selection among professional basketball players in the NBA. Typically, NBA players are discussed and compared in an…
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…
We investigate the hot hand hypothesis in professional darts in a near-ideal setting with minimal to no interaction between players. Considering almost one year of tournament data, corresponding to 167,492 dart throws in total, we use…
The existence of "Hot Hands" and "Streaks" in sports and gambling is hotly debated, but there is no uncertainty about the recent batting-average of the New York Times: it is now two-for-two in mangling and misunderstanding elementary…
Star Golden State Warriors Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Kevin Durant are great shooters but they are not streak shooters. Only rarely do they show signs of a hot hand. This conclusion is based on an empirical analysis of field goal and…
Professional sports constitute an important part of people's modern life. People spend substantial amounts of time and money supporting their favorite players and teams, and sometimes even riot after games. However, how team performance…
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…
A physical model is developed, which suggests a pathway to determining the optimal release conditions for a basketball free throw. Theoretical framework is supported by Monte Carlo simulations and a series of free throws performed and…
National Basketball Association (NBA) players are highly motivated and skilled experts that solve complex decision making problems at every time point during a game. As a step towards understanding how players make their decisions, we focus…
Experience is an important asset in almost any professional activity. In basketball, there is believed to be a positive association between coaching experience and effective use of team timeouts. Here, we analyze both the extent to which a…
The massive growth of sports videos has resulted in a need for automatic generation of sports highlights that are comparable in quality to the hand-edited highlights produced by broadcasters such as ESPN. Unlike previous works that mostly…
We study the relationship between performance and practice by analyzing the activity of many players of a casual online game. We find significant heterogeneity in the improvement of player performance, given by score, and address this by…
We report an emergence of bifurcation in basketball, a single-particle system governed by Newtonian mechanics. When shooting the basketball, the obvious control parameters are the launch speed and the launch angle. We propose to use the…
The success rate of a basketball shot may be higher at locations where a player makes more shots. For a marked spatial point process, this means that the mark and the intensity are associated. We propose a Bayesian joint model for the mark…
The idea that the success rate of a team increases when playing home is broadly accepted and documented for a wide variety of sports. Investigations on the so-called home advantage phenomenon date back to the 70's and every since has…
Pace of play is an important characteristic in hockey as well as other team sports. We provide the first comprehensive study of pace within the sport of hockey, focusing on how teams and players impact pace in different regions of the ice,…
We present a simple game model where agents with different memory lengths compete for finite resources. We show by simulation and analytically that an instability exists at a critical memory length, and as a result, different memory lengths…
When a ball hits a surface, does the angle of reflection always equal the angle of incidence? Not at all! Depending on the interplay of the ball's spin and speed and the force of friction, the ball's behavior after the bounce may differ…
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…