Related papers: Is Basketball a Game of Runs?
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…
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.…
A same-score streak in sports is a sequence of games where the scores are equivalent in all games. The motivating problem arose from college basketball, however due to the difficulty in collecting data, streaks in Major League Baseball…
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…
We use a simple machine learning model, logistically-weighted regularized linear least squares regression, in order to predict baseball, basketball, football, and hockey games. We do so using only the thirty-year record of which visiting…
How often can we expect a Major League Baseball team to score at least 20 runs in a single game? Considered a rare event in baseball, the outcome of scoring at least 20 runs in a game has occurred 224 times during regular season games since…
Among the sports fans beliefs about "hot hands" and "winning streaks" are widely spread, while the scientific debate about these effects is still ongoing. Recently in a paper by P. Ferreira [Physica A 500: 92-96] detrended fluctuation…
Timeout is a short interruption during games used to communicate a change in strategy, to give the players a rest or to stop a negative flow in the game. Whatever the reason, coaches expect an improvement in their team's performance after a…
Throughout the analytical revolution that has occurred in the NBA, the development of specific metrics and formulas has given teams, coaches, and players a new way to see the game. However - the question arises - how can we verify any…
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…
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…
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…
It is customary for researchers and practitioners to fit linear models in order to predict NBA player's salary based on the players' performance on court. On the contrary, we focus on the players salary share (with regards to the team…
The debate surrounding the hot hand in the NBA has been ongoing for many years. However, many of the previous works on this theme has focused on only the very next sequential shot attempt, often on very select players. This work looks in…
In this paper, we propose a shot percentage distribution strategy among the players of a basketball team to maximize the score that can be achieved by them. The approach is based on the concepts of game theory related to network flow.
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…
A new approach in team sports analysis consists in studying positioning and movements of players during the game in relation to team performance. State of the art tracking systems produce spatio-temporal traces of players that have…
There seems to be an upper limit to predicting the outcome of matches in (semi-)professional sports. Recent work has proposed that this is due to chance and attempts have been made to simulate the distribution of win percentages to identify…
We present a data-driven basketball set play simulation. Given an offensive set play sketch, our method simulates potential scenarios that may occur in the game. The simulation provides coaches and players with insights on how a given set…
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…