Today, technology is increasingly used in sport. Indeed, the players' statistics are more and more accurate and more and more numerous. Clubs employ people to acquire data and use it to improve performance. It is in this context that the MecaSportCo Research Application Project, conducted at the Ecole Centrale de Lyon by Gabin Rolland and Nathan Rivière, under the supervision of Wouter Bos and Romain Vuillemot.
The aim of this study is to quantify how "free" a basketball player is and how this influences his 3-points shot performance.
The dataset we use is derived from Stats company data and SportsVU technology. These are the 632 men's basketball games in the NBA during 2015-2016 season. For each match we have the movement data for the ball and players taken 25 times per second and stored in the form JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). The following figure shows the general structure of the data:
- 1_Introduction_to_space_occupation
- 2_time_calculation where we detail a way to model players'trajectories and how to calcul time needed for a player to go from a point a to b with a given initial velocity.
- 3_Comparison_of_ways_to_quantify_free_space in which the comparison of occupancy calculations is taken further and in which a new way to quantify how "free" a player is is introduced.
- 4_Free_space_and_3-points_efficiency in which we focus on 3-points shot and the link between efficiency and free-space.
References of the project can be found in Bibliography