Decisions at the end of basketball games often decide the outcome. There are many difficult choices to be made with shot selection, pace, defensive style, and more. However, basketball teams and coaches may not be maximizing their win probability based on their choices. In this article, I will look at the win probabilities of 3 … Continue reading Foul up 3 or Defend?: Analyzing late game strategy
Outside shooting is more important now than ever in the NBA. The frequency of three point attempts has been increasing since the beginning of the 2010's. The simplest measure of 3-point ability is basic 3-point percentage, but this metric does not tell the whole story. It lacks too much context. A player can make 30 … Continue reading True Shooting Ability: Separating Shooting Talent from Shot Circumstances
One of the most unfortunate things in sports are injuries. Teams and players have almost no control over this, and one wrong move can derail a team's season or a player's career. Take the Brooklyn Nets, for example. The Nets looked like they would be one of the NBA's top contenders, but an injury to … Continue reading The Cost of Injuries: Injury Adjusted Wins
The NBA commonly uses five positions to group players: point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center. However, today's NBA is becoming increasingly position-less. Instead, teams care more about the specific skills and tendencies of players when making lineups. This has led to the need to create new grouping for players. One way … Continue reading Generating NBA Archetypes Using K-Means Clustering
The Eastern Conference Finals between the Celtics and Heat has been a tightly contested series, with each game being unpredictable. In Game 7, the game that would decide which team faces the Warriors in the Finals, the Heat found themselves down just 2 points with less than 30 seconds left in the game. Marcus Smart … Continue reading Did Jimmy Butler Take the Right Shot?
The 76ers lost to the Miami Heat in 6 games in the Conference Semi-Finals, marking the fifth consecutive year that their playoff journey ends before the conference finals. While their core players of Joel Embiid and James Harden seem promising, smaller issues keep hurting their team. This year seemed like one of the 76ers' best … Continue reading What Went Wrong for the 76ers
The NBA Playoffs have begun and there are several teams that can win the championship. As of April 21, there are 6 teams with at least a 5% chance of winning the championship according to 538.com's NBA predictions. After years of shortcomings in the playoffs and a slow start to tis year's season, I think … Continue reading Why the Celtics Will Win the NBA Finals
One of the hardest tasks for NBA defenses are to guard All-Star type point guards. Players like Trae Young, Luka Doncic, Chris Paul, and Kyrie Irving give defenses fits every night by being a threat to pull up, drive, or pass for the open shot. However, like all other players, these versatile playmakers can be … Continue reading How to Guard the NBA’s Best Players
Player defense has been one of the hardest elements to quantify in basketball since the rise of analytics. The box score stats for player defense are limited to steals, blocks, and defensive rebounds, with no context for the number of shots defended and how many turnovers a player actually forced. However, recent tracking statistics have … Continue reading Tracking Defensive Plus Minus: Ranking the NBA’s Best Defenders
The 2020-21 NBA season has concluded, and it's time to look towards the upcoming offseason. The first major event in the offseason is always the NBA Draft, where college and international players are selected by teams looking to improve their roster. Most of the attention is focused towards the top few selections, where the worst … Continue reading 3 And D: The Best Two-Way Players in the 2021 NBA Draft
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