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 […]

Last Saturday I attended the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. During the Basketball Analytics panel, this quote from Mark Cuban got me thinking: There’s not 10 players on the court, there’s 13. And three of them determine about 80 percent of what happens out there. Along with this excerpt, he mentioned something along the lines […]

Studying the relationship between shooting and defensive efficiency has made me wonder what, if anything, we can learn by rating a player’s impact on shooting percentages from various locations on the court. The Model Borrowing from the idea of adjusted plus/minus, I ran a logistic regression for data from the ’07-’08 regular season for the field […]