Basketball Geek
Advancing our understanding of the game of basketball

In my last post I presented individual offensive efficiency ratings that were extracted from play-by-play data. In this post I will present individual defensive efficiency ratings that I have extracted from play-by-play data. As with the individual offensive efficiency ratings, I’ve constructed these individual defensive efficiency ratings in a similar fashion as Dean Oliver does […]

I’m unsatisfied with the usefulness of individual efficiency ratings that estimate the offensive and defensive impact of a player on a lineup’s efficiency by simply controlling for the strength of teammates and opponents. This is because these ratings don’t really give any insight into what the individual players are actually doing. These ratings are simply […]

One part of Wayne Winston’s new book Mathletics that I didn’t really like was the way he compared raw lineup data to determine if one lineup is better than another. After thinking about it more, I think the real reason I don’t like his method is because he compares the lineups’ net points per minute […]

In my last post on retrodicting team efficiency, I set a general baseline that can be used help determine if a new model of team efficiency makes better predictions than a naive model. This is important, as we want to know if added model complexity is worth the hassle. This post will present a basic […]