Related papers: Rao-Blackwellizing Field Goal Percentage
Unlike other major professional sports, American football lacks comprehensive statistical ratings for player evaluation that are both reproducible and easily interpretable in terms of game outcomes. Existing methods for player evaluation in…
One of the emerging trends for sports analytics is the growing use of player and ball tracking data. A parallel development is deep learning predictive approaches that use vast quantities of data with less reliance on feature engineering.…
This paper explores a Bayesian self-organization method for state-space models, enabling simultaneous state and parameter estimation without repeated likelihood calculations. While efficient for low-dimensional models, high-dimensional…
This paper presents CourtMotion, a spatiotemporal modeling framework for analyzing and predicting game events and plays as they develop in professional basketball. Anticipating basketball events requires understanding both physical motion…
Over the past century, basketball analytics has moved from simple box-score rates toward complex context-aware measures that evaluate events by their expected effect on game outcomes. Officiating analysis has not made the same transition:…
In the sports of soccer, hockey and basketball the most commonly used statistics for player performance assessment are divided into two categories: offensive statistics and defensive statistics. However, qualitative assessments of…
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 introduce a new sufficient statistic for the population parameter vector by allowing for the sampling design to first be selected at random amongst a set of candidate sampling designs. In contrast to the traditional approach in survey…
Batting average is one of the principle performance measures for an individual baseball player. It is natural to statistically model this as a binomial-variable proportion, with a given (observed) number of qualifying attempts (called…
This paper develops metrics from a social network perspective that are directly translatable to the outcome of a basketball game. We extend a state-of-the-art multi-resolution stochastic process approach to modeling basketball by modeling…
Analysis of the popular expected goals (xG) metric in soccer has determined that a (slightly) smaller number of high-quality attempts will likely yield more goals than a slew of low-quality ones. This observation has driven a change in…
We present a novel representation of NBA players' shooting patterns based on Functional Data Analysis (FDA). Each player's charts of made and missed shots are treated as smooth functional data defined over a two-dimensional domain…
We present a tractable framework for detecting changes in performance metrics and apply these methods to Major League Baseball (MLB) batting and pitching data from the 2023 and 2024 seasons. We propose a changepoint detection algorithm that…
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…
Given an image sequence featuring a portion of a sports field filmed by a moving and uncalibrated camera, such as the one of the smartphones, our goal is to compute automatically in real time the focal length and extrinsic camera parameters…
The purpose of this paper is to determine whether basketball teams who choose to employ an offensive strategy that involves predominantly shooting three point shots is stable and optimal. We employ a game-theoretical approach using…
Fantasy basketball has a rich underlying mathematical structure which makes optimal drafting strategy unclear. A central issue for category leagues is how to aggregate a player's statistics from all categories into a single number…
Computer Vision developments are enabling significant advances in many fields, including sports. Many applications built on top of Computer Vision technologies, such as tracking data, are nowadays essential for every top-level analyst,…
Basketball games evolve continuously in space and time as players constantly interact with their teammates, the opposing team, and the ball. However, current analyses of basketball outcomes rely on discretized summaries of the game that…
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…