Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – April 28th, 2020
Football: PFF’s Eric Eager on The analytical standouts of the 2020 NFL Draft. Football Perspective examines The 2020 NFL Draft, Value By Position: Wide Receivers / Offense Dominate The Day and Draft Capital Used On Offensive Tackles and Interior Offensive Linemen. Football Outsiders guest column by Cole Jacobson on End-of-Half Strategy in the NFL. In another guest column, Caio Brighenti explains Why Successful Run Plays Work.The SIS blog hands out NFL Draft Team Grades Using the Football Rookie Handbook. FIveThirtyEight’s Josh Hermsmeyer on Which NFL Teams Reached In The First Round, And Which Found The Most Value. The SIS blog charts out Where your team fell on the filling needs / drafting value spectrum. Lee Sharpe provides NFL trade data since 2011 (via Pro Football Reference) in a nice usable CSV format.
Baseball: FanGraphs’ Best Bunts, and Bunters, of 2019. Baseball Prospectus Baseball Therapy: Why Is It So Hard to Build a Winner? Mark Simon ponders Are Matt Olson and Chapman the best corner duo in the “Runs Saved era?” Baseball Reference Introduces Baseball’s Premier Research Tool: Stathead. FanGraphs Puts KBO Players in an MLB Context.
Basketball: Nylon Calculus: Basketball’s optimal stopping problem. Nathan Walker’s tweet with NBA writeups you need to know: A Starting Point for Analyzing Basketball. Eli Boettger’s Brandon Clarke Rule: Out-drafting the Phoenix Suns using a single stat. FiveThirtyEight’s Neil Paine points out Ben Wallace Anchored A Damn Good Pistons Squad.
College Basketball: Jordan Sperber’s Hoop Vision Weekly: The On-Ball/Off-Ball Spectrum. FIveThirtyEight writes that Muffet McGraw Retired Just Short Of 1,000 Wins. Will Anyone Reach That Mark Again?
Hockey: NHLSeattle.com gives a Hockey Analytics Starter Kit.
Soccer: Tom Worville provides The maths that shows leagues shouldn’t be decided on points per game. StatsBomb summarizes What We Know About the Premier League. Friends of Tracking continues its series of videos on working with soccer analytics data.
Your Moment of R: Sebastian Carl and Ben Baldwin introduced nflfastR, an R package for scraping NFL data faster. Thomas Mock supplemented that with a blogpost to show how you can easily create a RSQLite database via R and rapidly query with dplyr. Beyond the Box Score’s Kenny Kelly chronicles his journey of Learning R: Into the tidyverse. Mitch Henderson’s New post & video tutorial on how sports scientists can use ggplot2 in R to make better visualizations.
Conferences: The Sounders FC 2020 Sports Science Virtual Seminar will be on Wednesdays May 6, 13 and 20. HANIC 5 Advanced Hockey Analytics is May 2nd.