Basketball Geek
Advancing our understanding of the game of basketball

Over the past few days I’ve done a little house keeping and updated various sections of the website. Here is a quick list of the updates: NBA Power Rankings: @kpelton‘s recent Basketball Prospectus article inspired me to rank and rate NBA teams using some of the more recent tools I’ve added to my toolbox. You […]

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 […]

I have no idea how important defensive fouls are. This bothers me, as fouls are an important part of the game. Clearly you’d prefer to draw more fouls than you commit, but how important is it relative to the other things players do? How might a player and team increase (decrease) the number of fouls […]