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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:…
Box score statistics in the National Basketball Association are used to measure and evaluate player performance. Some of these statistics are subjective in nature and since box score statistics are recorded by scorekeepers hired by the home…
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…
Over the past two decades, the notion of implicit bias has come to serve as an important component in our understanding of discrimination in activities such as hiring, promotion, and school admissions. Research on implicit bias posits that…
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…
This paper examines whether increased awareness can affect racial bias and colorism. We exploit a natural experiment arising from the widespread publicity of Price and Wolfers (2010), which served as an external shock, intensifying scrutiny…
Sports broadcasters inject drama into play-by-play commentary by building team and player narratives through subjective analyses and anecdotes. Prior studies based on small datasets and manual coding show that such theatrics evince…
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…
Box score statistics are the baseline measures of performance for National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball. Between the 2011-2012 and 2015-2016 seasons, NCAA teams performed better at home compared to on the road in nearly…
Increased data availability has stimulated the interest in studying sports prediction problems via analytical approaches; in particular, with machine learning and simulation. We characterize several models that have been proposed in the…
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,…
The 2020 NBA playoffs were played inside of a bubble in Disney World because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This meant that there were no fans in attendance, games played on neutral courts and no traveling for teams, which in theory removes…
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…
In this paper, we employ machine learning techniques to analyze seventeen seasons (1999-2000 to 2015-2016) of NBA regular season data from every team to determine the common characteristics among NBA playoff teams. Each team was…
In the summer of 2017, the National Basketball Association reduced the number of total timeouts, along with other rule changes, to regulate the flow of the game. With these rule changes, it becomes increasingly important for coaches to…
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.…
Unbiased data collection is essential to guaranteeing fairness in artificial intelligence models. Implicit bias, a form of behavioral conditioning that leads us to attribute predetermined characteristics to members of certain groups and…
In many sports, it is commonly believed that the home team has an advantage over the visiting team, known as the home field advantage. Yet its causal effect on team performance is largely unknown. In this paper, we propose a novel causal…
Professional sports constitute an important part of people's modern life. People spend substantial amounts of time and money supporting their favorite players and teams, and sometimes even riot after games. However, how team performance…
The variations between in-group and out-group speech (intergroup bias) are subtle and could underlie many social phenomena like stereotype perpetuation and implicit bias. In this paper, we model the intergroup bias as a tagging task on…