Yesterday’s Thunder-Heat game was a fun game to watch and a great game to investigate. Oklahoma City started out with a significant advantage in this game: OKC was at home (worth 3.24 pts/100 poss) and was playing on 1 day of rest (+1.94), while Miami was playing their 3rd game in 4 days, and on … [Read more…]
Last week, I unveiled a Google Motion Chart that included a large number of advanced stats comparing point guards. This week, we’ll start at the other end: centers. I actually am including players classified as either C or PF/C by BasketballValue, where I got the position information.
Most people feel that the position of center is changing, morphing into something different than it once was. The presence of numerous “centers” that hang around on the perimeter shooting 3’s is an indicator of this phenomenon. Still, there is a defined way a center plays–and to define it, let’s turn to the lovely tool known as K-Means Clustering.
The study of football is much more tricky than that of basketball–there are more players on the field and fewer plays and games to study. The links in the sidebar list a few of the sites that have done good work studying football statistics. Since the players are hard to analyze, I have confined myself … [Read more…]
The concept of With-or-Without-You is very basic. If you are playing, is our team better or worse? If the team is worse with you available, then that’s a really bad sign! It’s the core concept behind such basketball metrics as +/-, Statistical Plus/Minus and Advanced Plus/Minus. In baseball, Tom Tango and MGL work with it … [Read more…]