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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…
We present a quantitative analysis of throwing ability for major league outfielders and catchers. We use detailed game event data to tabulate success and failure events in outfielder and catcher throwing opportunities. We attribute a run…
The PITCHf/x database has allowed the statistical analysis of of Major League Baseball (MLB) to flourish since its introduction in late 2006. Using PITCHf/x, pitches have been classified by hand, requiring considerable effort, or using…
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…
Injuries are a major cost in sports. Teams spend millions of dollars every year on players who are hurt and unable to play, resulting in lost games, decreased fan interest and additional wages for replacement players. Modern convolutional…
Numerous statistics have been proposed for the measure of offensive ability in major league baseball. While some of these measures may offer moderate predictive power in certain situations, it is unclear which simple offensive metrics are…
Predicting athletes' performance has relied mostly on statistical data. Besides the traditional data, various types of data, including video, have become available. However, it is challenging to use them for deep learning, especially when…
I address the difficult challenge of measuring the relative influence of competing basketball game strategies, and I apply my analysis to plays resulting in three-point shots. I use a glut of SportVU player tracking data from over 600 NBA…
One of the most important and challenging problems in football is predicting future player performance when transferred to another club within and between different leagues. In addition to being the most valuable prediction a team makes, it…
In the National Basketball Association (NBA), teams must make choices about which players to acquire, how much to pay them, and other decisions that are fundamentally dependent on player effectiveness. Thus, there is great interest in…
For professional basketball, finding valuable and suitable players is the key to building a winning team. To deal with such challenges, basketball managers, scouts and coaches are increasingly turning to analytics. Objective evaluation of…
Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were…
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…
Systemic and idiosyncratic patterns in pitching mechanics of 24 top starting pitchers in Major League Baseball (MLB) are extracted and discovered from PITCHf/x database. These evolving patterns across different pitchers or seasons are…
We consider a study of players employed by teams who are members of the National Basketball Association where units of observation are functional curves that are realizations of production measurements taken through the course of one's…
In 2024, Major League Baseball released new bat tracking data, reporting swing-by-swing bat speed and swing length measured at the point of contact. While exciting, the data present challenges for their interpretation. The timing of the…
Early identification of college dropouts can provide tremendous value for improving student success and institutional effectiveness, and predictive analytics are increasingly used for this purpose. However, ethical concerns have emerged…
The impact of player age on performance has received attention across sport. Most research has focused on the performance of players at each age, ignoring the reality that age likewise influences which players receive opportunities to…
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…
Motivated by the goal of evaluating real-time forecasts of home team win probabilities in the National Basketball Association, we develop new tools for measuring the quality of continuously updated probabilistic forecasts. This includes…