http://www.countthebasket.com/blog Advanced Stats for Basketball Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:19:25 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that I've accepted an offer to work for an NBA team doing statistical analysis along the lines of the work I've posted on this site. The bad news is that the future research I do will be just for ... http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/06/12/hiatus/ I mentioned in my last post on calculating adjusted plus/minus that the next thing I wanted to do was split it into offensive and defensive adjusted plus/minus. Lior and Cherokee_ACB had some good suggestions about how to do that in the comments, but first I wanted to see if I ... http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/06/03/offensive-and-defensive-adjusted-plus-minus/ Adjusted plus/minus is a way of rating players first developed by Wayne Winston and Jeff Sagarin in the form of their WINVAL system (more here). The basic idea is simple. For each player, it starts with the team's average point differential for each possession when they are on the court ... http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/06/01/calculating-adjusted-plus-minus/ I'm still working on that follow-up post on regression to the mean, but in the meantime I wanted to put up a post comparing various player rating systems. For the most part this will be a subjective rather than objective evaluation of the metrics, along the lines of Dean Oliver's ... http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/05/28/comparing-player-ratings/ Jason from BallHype has a new post on Chris Paul with some really nice dynamic charts thanks to the Google Chart API. http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/05/22/google-charts/ In my next few posts I'm going to cover the topic of regression to the mean, and how it applies to basketball statistics. This is a complex issue and this first post is pretty heavy on the math, but I plan on following it up with more practical examples showing ... http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/05/19/regression-to-the-mean/ Following up on my previous post, I thought it might be interesting to look at the strength of the opposing lineups that individual players faced, rather than looking at five-man units as a whole. The basic idea is the same. I used lineup data from BasketballValue, and for each player ... http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/04/25/feasting-on-the-weak/ Recently, 82games put up some pages listing the top five-man lineups from this past regular season in terms of plus/minus and points scored and allowed per possession. You can find similar rankings on BasketballValue. I wanted to go a step further and adjust each lineup's ranking based on the quality ... http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/04/24/adjusted-lineup-rankings/ I'm working on a longer study, but for now here are a few links. Last week, the New York Times had an article on using Chernoff faces to visualize data about baseball managers. The Arbitrarian followed that up with a post that used Chernoff faces to compare some star players in ... http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/04/09/chernoff-faces/ Here's a long Q and A with Bill James that's well worth reading. This response in particular caught my eye: Q: Generally, who should have a larger role in evaluating college and minor league players: scouts or stat guys? A: Ninety-five percent scouts, five percent stats. The thing is that — ... http://www.countthebasket.com/blog/2008/04/03/thoughts-from-bill-james/