Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – August 21st, 2018
Football: Football Perspective examines Red Zone Performance Since 2002. FiveThirtyEight says The Browns’ Suckiness Defies Math And Reason. Football Outsiders’ 2017 DVOA by Routes: Receivers and Quarterbacks. Football Perspective finds that 400-Yard Passing Games Now Come In Losing Efforts More Often Than Not. Ed Feng blog post on How to make accurate football predictions with linear regression. The Ringer has a piece on The Technological Revolution Has Finally Hit the NFL—and the Vikings Are Ready.
Baseball: Nate Freiman at FanGraphs on How Much Height Affects a Hitter’s Zone. Beyond the Box Defines what it really means to be Most Valuable. Bill James looks at The 2018 NL MVP candidates. FanGraphs writes that The Mariners Still Look Like an All-Time Anomaly. The Hardball Times articles on The Physics and Timing of the Outfield Bounce Throw and The Physics of “Monsta Shawts”. Tom Tango starts a blog post series on Zero-point of positional adjustments. FanGraphs finds The Rockies’ Lack of Depth Is Costing Them Wins.
Basketball: FiveThirtyEight says The NBA’s Small Guys Are Getting Bigger, And That’s Bad News For Isaiah Thomas. Her Hoops Stats on Which mid-season trade will have the biggest WNBA playoff impact.
Hockey: Puck++ looks at the relationship between Shift Ends and Shot Rates.
Soccer: American Soccer Analysis: The good, the bad, and the unlucky: What Expected Points tell us about the 2018 MLS season. StatsBomb on Chelsea’s Rebound Date: Kepa Arrizabalaga. Kostas Pelechrinis updates his paper with Wayne Winston on Estimating positional value and expected league points added above replacement in soccer using FIFA player ratings.
Tennis: Heavy Topspin Measures a Season’s Worth of Luck. Jeff Sackmann on the Economist: The new serve clock in tennis appears to backfiring. Stephanie Kovalchik on Who is the Teen GOAT of men’s tennis.
The Bornn Papers: Luke Born teams with Daniel Daly-Grafstein on Rao-Blackwellizing Field Goal Percentage. Luke Born teams with Yatao Zhong, Bicheng Xu, Guang-Tong Zhou and Greg Mori on Time Perception Machine: Temporal Point Processes for the When, Where and What of Activity Prediction.
Your moment of R: Mladen Jovanovic’s paper, code and video on Data Preparation for Injury Prediction. Michael Lopez Coded up a football field in R. Josh Hermsmeyer’s code and data for Bayesian “True” TD Rates for NFL QBs using David Robinson’s Empirical Bayes on the Binomial in R (ebbr) package.
Conferences: The Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics September 10-14 in Dublin. The Ottawa Hockey Analytics Conference will be held September 14-15 in Ottawa. Nylon Calculus Recaps the Great Lakes Analytics in Sports Conference. Mike Lambiaso reviews Highlights From Saberseminar 2018.