Clutch Factor is an attempt to determine how good a basketball team is at finishing a game. Do certain teams tend to choke, get unlucky, or similar moreso than others? A comparable metric would be the KenPom "Luck" stat. Is there a way to quantifiably define "clutch"? There are a couple of factors that may be interesting to keep an eye on as a basketball game progresses towards the end, including but not limited to:
- Shot selection
- Shot percentage
- Turnovers
- Free throws
- Fouls
- Time of possession per offensive drive
- Opponents stats for these metrics
Generally the sample set is comprised of college basketball seasons with the base team being the Clemson University Men's Basketball Team, partly because of nepotism, but also partly because of pent up frustration in recent seasons. While the motivation is from college basketball, I see no reason why the same intended process could not be applied to any other league of basketball as they all generally record the same level of pedantry.
As of writing, all intended sources will come from ESPN as they provide a (moderately) web scrapable platform for play by play information to the degree that no other site I have found can provide.
Please feel free to contribute to the project. I plan to base the project around Python but it might be interesting to create some sort of visual GUI as an end product to do exploration rather than a CLI input-output type deal. I have discussions enabled so feel free to discuss any ideas, metrics, etc. that should be considered.