A Joint Analysis for Field Goal Attempts and Percentages of Professional Basketball Players: Bayesian Nonparametric Resource

Journal of Data Science

article

Eliot Wong-Toi¹  Hou-Cheng Yang²  Weining Shen¹  Guanyu Hu³ 

[1] Department of Statistics, University of California Irvine;Department of Statistics, Florida State University;Department of Statistics, University of Missouri

关键词: Chinese restaurant process;    mixture model;    shot charts data;    spatial spline;    sport analytics;   

DOI  :  10.6339/22-JDS1062

学科分类：土木及结构工程学

来源: JDS

【 摘 要 】

Understanding shooting patterns among different players is a fundamental problem in basketball game analyses. In this paper, we quantify the shooting pattern via the field goal attempts and percentages over twelve non-overlapping regions around the front court. A joint Bayesian nonparametric mixture model is developed to find latent clusters of players based on their shooting patterns. We apply our proposed model to learn the heterogeneity among selected players from the National Basketball Association (NBA) games over the 2018–2019 regular season and 2019–2020 bubble season. Thirteen clusters are identified for 2018–2019 regular season and seven clusters are identified for 2019–2020 bubble season. We further examine the shooting patterns of players in these clusters and discuss their relation to players’ other available information. The results shed new insights on the effect of NBA COVID bubble and may provide useful guidance for player’s shot selection and team’s in-game and recruiting strategy planning.

【 授权许可】

CC BY