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During the 2017 NBA playoffs, Celtics coach Brad Stevens was faced with a difficult decision when defending against the Cavaliers: "Do you double and risk giving up easy shots, or stay at home and do the best you can?" It's a tough call,…
This book chapter reviews some of the major principles associated with optimal strategy in basketball. In particular, we consider the principles of allocative efficiency (optimal allocation of shots between offensive options), dynamic…
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…
Motivated by cost of computation in game theory, we explore how changing the utilities of players (changing their complexity costs) affects the outcome of a game. We show that even if we improve a player's utility in every action profile,…
We investigate how similar heatmaps of soccer players are when constructed from (i) event datasets and (ii) tracking datasets. When using event datasets, we show that the scale at which the events are grouped strongly influences the…
In this study, basketball teams are conceptualized as complex adaptive systems to examine their (re)organizational processes in response the time remaining to shoot. Using temporal passing networks to model team behavior, the focus is on…
Every shot in basketball has an opportunity cost; one player's shot eliminates all potential opportunities from their teammates for that play. For this reason, player-shot efficiency should ultimately be considered relative to the lineup.…
Extreme heat negatively impacts cognition, learning, and task performance. With increasing global temperatures, workers may therefore be at increased risk of work-related injuries and illness. This study estimates the effects of temperature…
We introduce a simple stochastic dynamics for game theory. It assumes ``local'' rationality in the sense that any player climbs the gradient of his utility function in the presence of a stochastic force which represents deviation from…
Although basketball is a dualistic sport, with all players competing on both offense and defense, almost all of the sport's conventional metrics are designed to summarize offensive play. As a result, player valuations are largely based on…
Objectives: This article sheds light on the different heat stress management strategies, common or innovative, in order to analyze those that would be the most suitable and effective for athletes who have to compete in humid and/or hot…
Game Theory concepts have been successfully applied in a wide variety of domains over the past decade. Sports and games are one of the popular areas of game theory application owing to its merits and benefits in solving complex scenarios.…
Optimizing the performance of a basketball offense may be viewed as a network problem, wherein each play represents a "pathway" through which the ball and players may move from origin (the in-bounds pass) to goal (the basket). Effective…
Although the data-driven analysis of football players' performance has been developed for years, most research only focuses on the on-ball event including shots and passes, while the off-ball movement remains a little-explored area in this…
We implement a propensity score matching technique to present the first evidence on the impact of labor supply decisions during labor disputes on worker productivity in the context of professional sports. In particular, we utilize a unique…
The infield shift has been increasingly used as a defensive strategy in baseball in recent years. Along with the upward trend in its usage, the notoriety of the shift has grown, as it is believed to be responsible for the recent decline in…
Although academic research on the 'hot hand' effect (in particular, in sports, especially in basketball) has been going on for more than 30 years, it still remains a central question in different areas of research whether such an effect…
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 presence of momentum in sports, where the outcome of a previous event affects a following event, is a belief often held by fans, and has been the subject of statistical study for many sports. This paper investigates the presence and…
The development of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has benefited from the emergency of a variety type of game environments where new challenging problems are proposed and new algorithms can be tested safely and quickly, such as Board…