DailyDirt: Digging Into Sports Statistics

Studies

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Baseball fans have been fascinated with player statistics for a really, really long time. Sabermetrics changed a few things about baseball in recent years, so it’s about time other sports started looking into more rigorous data analysis, too. Fantasy team managers and actual professional coaches are both looking for diamond-in-the-rough players, and more player statistics are being collected and analyzed to find them. Here are just a few interesting developments in the field of performance analysis.

• Looking at the stats for 452 NBA players, there are far more than the five traditional positions in basketball — try 13 different kinds of players. The ‘Paint Protector’ position gets more fouls than shots and collects rebounds like crazy. The ‘Scoring Rebounder’ might be a more highly-paid player, though. [url]
• The NBA wants to provide more engaging statistics to its fans, so it’s turned to enterprise software solutions — SAP HANA. Will re-purposed business analytics software be able to appeal to millions of fans? [url]
• The PageRank algorithm can be applied to soccer players, based on how many passes a player receives from his teammates, to help analyze how players fit into a team and quantify the overall strength of a team. Obviously, this algorithm has several limitations, but soccer isn’t as statistic-friendly as other sports, so data analysis strategies for soccer are not as well developed. [url]

If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Filed Under: analytics, basketball, data, pagerank, sabermetrics, soccer, sports
Companies: nba, sap