Tuesday, October 10th @ 11:00-12:30 PM (639 Evans Hall)
Advances in Basketball Analytics Using Player Tracking Data
Alexander N D'amour, UC Berkeley
In the 2013-2014 season, the National Basketball League, in conjunction with STATS LLC, implemented a league-wide program to collect player-tracking data for all NBA games. The data feed now provides 25-FPS records of all players' XY coordinates on the court, as well as XYZ coordinates for the ball. This data source has opened up new lines in inquiry into the quantitative analysis of basketball that have previously been hamstrung by a reliance on spatially naive box-score and play-by-play statistics. In this talk I will discuss several projects undertaken by myself and the XY Research group(link is external) that use newly-available spatial data to work toward answering fundamental questions about basketball. Topics covered will include expected (EPV, or a stock-ticker for a possession), defensive shot charts, the impact of ball movement, and play detection.