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How well do you need to shoot the ball to win it all? As we continue our look at the Last Ten Champions at each level, we come to the analysis of shooting percentages. Namely, True Shooting Percentage and Effective Field Goal Percentage. As a refresher from previous blog entries, True Shooting Percentage factors in …
We never want turnovers. But let’s face it, you never have a game with zero turnovers. Even if you’re blowing out a team, you’ll have a fast break that ends with a pass sailing out of bounds. The question is how many turnovers are we ok with? Let’s first define turnover percentage. It’s an estimate …
Let’s talk about the last ten champs have dominated the boards. We’re going to specifically look at Rebounding Percentages, that is, the percentage of available rebounds a team actually collects. From a formulaic standpoint, total rebounding percentage is pretty straightforward because it’s just the number one team gets divided by total rebounds collected by both …
Let’s look at how the last ten champions at each level of NAIA basketball utilized the three-pointer. On the women’s side, similar to the NCAA, there doesn’t seem to be a definitive upward trend in the usage of the three-pointer when you look at it as percentage of points, percentage of overall field goal attempts …
There’s no doubt we’re seeing more and more three-point attempts in college basketball but is three the magic number for winning a championship? In looking at the last ten NCAA champs for both the men and women, we have found that’s pretty much true on the men’s side while it’s a mixed bag on the …
This is not a plea to revive the game show The Weakest Link from 2001. Rather, I recently read a book called The Numbers Game which discusses analytics in the world of soccer. One of the chapters is how success in soccer is not tied as much to the strongest players on your team, but rather the …
Last week, the NCAA signed a 10-year data and technology deal with Genius Sports. The agreement was announced on the same day the Supreme Court moved to legalize betting on sports. The goal will be to centralize and then MONETIZE the NCAA data. Who is Genius Sports? Genius Sports is a London-based company that works …
If you watch any of the talking head shows on ESPN or Fox, you hear a lot of discussion about whether certain players are ‘clutch’. Not too long ago, Lebron James was the subject of these conversations. More recently, it’s anyone on the Toronto Raptors. I’m not going to get into any of the esoteric …
Assist Percentage is the percentage of all field goal attempts assisted by the player while he/she was on the floor. There is no corresponding team percentage because it would be 100% in all cases. In 2017-18, John Wall led the NBA at 49.6%. The other leaders shouldn’t surprise anyone – Lebron, Westbrook, Harden, Simmons (shout …
You probably saw a number of clever commercials throughout the NCAA Tournament about the partnership between Google Cloud and the NCAA. We did some digging to see what this is all about. What is this? The NCAA is handing over all of their data to Google to parse out and sort through to …