Related papers: The causal effect of a timeout at stopping an oppo…
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…
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…
Problem definition: Professional sports leagues may be suspended due to various reasons such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. A critical question the league must address when re-opening is how to appropriately select a subset of the…
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) have long been the gold standard for causal inference across various fields, including business analysis, economic studies, sociology, clinical research, and network learning. The primary advantage of…
Implicit biases occur automatically and unintentionally and are particularly present when we have to make split second decisions. One such situations appears in refereeing, where referees have to make an instantaneous decision on a…
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:…
Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…
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…
The evolving landscape of online multiplayer gaming presents unique challenges in assessing the causal impacts of game features. Traditional A/B testing methodologies fall short due to complex player interactions, leading to violations of…
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…
As a baseball game progresses, batters appear to perform better the more times they face a particular pitcher. The apparent drop-off in pitcher performance from one time through the order to the next, known as the Time Through the Order…
In basketball, every time the offense produces a shot opportunity the player with the ball must decide whether the shot is worth taking. In this paper, I explore the question of when a team should shoot and when they should pass up the shot…
Randomized experiments have become a standard tool in economics. In analyzing randomized experiments, the traditional approach has been based on the Stable Unit Treatment Value (SUTVA: \cite{rubin}) assumption which dictates that there is…
American football is unique in that offensive and defensive units typically consist of separate players who don't share the field simultaneously, which tempts one to evaluate them independently. However, a team's offensive and defensive…
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…
I demonstrate that repetition heats players up, while interruption cools players down in NBA free throw shooting. My analysis also suggests that fatigue and stress come into play. If, as seems likely, all four of these effects have…
In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of the home team bunting in extra innings of Major League Baseball games when the game is tied in the bottom of the inning. Using methods rooted in causal inference, we show that teams choose…
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…
It's not unreasonable to think that in-game sporting performance can be affected partly by what takes place off the court. We can't observe what happens between games directly. Instead, we proxy for the possibility of athletes partying by…
In baseball, every play on the field is quantitatively evaluated and has an effect on individual and team strategies. The weighted on base average (wOBA) is well known as a measure of an batter's hitting contribution. However, this measure…