Old Championships, Modern Players
Introduction A few weeks ago, I saw a post on the NBA subreddit putting the 2003 San Antonio Spurs’ championship into perspective by comparing its roster to current players. While the original author’s logic is far too simple…
Read More »Predicting Teams’ Points against Opponents (Part 2)
This post is a sequel to Predicting Teams’ Points against Opponents. To summarize, in the previous post, we found that taking an average of teams’ offensive strength and opponents’ defensive strength performed best at predicting points scored against…
Read More »Predicting Teams’ Points against Opponents
Let’s think of a scenario. Team A is a great offensive team and has averaged 110 points against its opponents. But Team B is a great defensive team and has allowed only 90 points on average to its opponents. Given…
Read More »The Most Important Metric that Determines a Game’s Outcome
There are many metrics that fans use to describe a basketball game: points, field goal percentage (FGP), 3-pointer field goal percentage, free throw percentage, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers, rebounds, and many, many more. My question is this: “What’s…
Read More »Should Teams Shoot More 3-Point Shots? Finding the Right Balance Between 2-Point and 3-Point Shots
In basketball, a player can shoot either a 2-point shot or 3-point shot. Each 3-point shot made generates one extra point compared to a 2-point shot made. But it’s also more difficult to make a 3-point shot than…
Read More »Teams that Perform Best at Home
It is a well-known phenomenon that teams generally perform better during home games than during away games. However, some teams benefit from home court advantage much more than other teams. Using the NBA games dataset for the 2015…
Read More »Understanding point margins for point spread betting
Understanding basketball’s distribution of point margins can be helpful to many basketball fans, especially those who participate in point spread betting. In this post, I will attempt to show the distribution of point margins and how understanding it…
Read More »Source of Home Court Advantage
If you ever watched a sports game, you’ve probably heard of the term “home court advantage“. Home court advantage refers to the notion that a team has a certain advantage over its opponent while playing at a home…
Read More »Does a high number of offensive rebounds indicate a great game performance?
For each basketball game, a team’s performance metrics are measured through various tallies, and one of those metrics is offensive rebounds. After a missed shot, an offensive rebound gives a team another opportunity to score against its opponent….
Read More »A Look into the Top 50 Scoring Seasons
This post extracts the top 50 scoring seasons since 1981, the introduction of the 3-point line. This new mechanic undoubtedly changed the way players score, but how do the top scorers actually differ? You can view an interactive…
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