Weekly Sports Analytics News Roundup – February 26th, 2019

Football: Football Perspective’s Why Do Teams Run The Ball, Part III. Football Outsiders Evaluates Third-and-Long Strategy with Expected Points. Next Gen Stats: Most extraordinary QB-WR tandems of 2018. FiveThirtyEight writes that Legendary Quarterback John Elway Can’t Figure Out Quarterbacks.

College Football: Football Study Hall Revisits the 2011 college football season with advanced box scores.

Baseball: FanGraphs writes that Mike Trout Has Been as Good as Manny Machado and Bryce Harper Combined. FiveThirtyEight’s Travis Sawchik: Foul Balls Are The Pace-Of-Play Problem Nobody’s Talking About. The Hardball Times on Embracing Inefficiency: When We Like Pitchers Hitting. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver says Relievers Have Broken Baseball. He Has A Plan To Fix It. Tom Tango’s Statcast Lab: Active Spin Percentage. FanGraphs on the case of Ryan Feierabend and the Disappearing Knuckleball. Bill James continues his 12-article series: The Early Cy Young Seasons, Game Scores Versus Game Scores (2), The Pitching Leaders of the second Dead Ball Era, The Pitching Leaders of the 1960s and The Tom Seaver Era. FiveThirtyEight says Everything Went Right For The 2018 Red Sox. Are The Champs Destined To Regress? Pitcher List’s Going Deep: The Relationship Between Framing, Command and Control. The Sports Info Solutions blog’s Stat of the Week: The rise of outfield shifts.

Basketball: Nylon Calculus: Defining teams by their offensive style. Krishna Narsu updates player consistency stats. Anthony Sicilia, Konstantinos Pelechrinis and Kirk Goldsberry combine to publish DeepHoops: Evaluating Micro-Actions in Basketball Using Deep Feature Representations of Spatio-Temporal Data.

College Basketball: DribbleHandoff analyzed Zion Williamson’s on/off court data, optimal lineup combinations and impact on his teammates’ performance. FiveThirtyEight points out The Pac-12 Is In Shambles. Jordan Sperber’s latest podcast.

Hockey: Hockey Graphs Hacks the NHL Play-by-Play App in Shiny. PuckPossessed issue 13 shows Penalty Kill data for teams, players and coaches.

Soccer: StatsBomb’s Attacking Contributions: Markov Models for Football. Peter McKeever writes about a Slight Ache, Fatherhood and Pass Models.

Tennis: Heavy Topspin on Dominic Thiem, Tennys Sandgren, and Playing Your Way In. Stephanie Kovalchik;s blog post on Assessing the Fit of a Serve Prediction Model.

General: Article on Davidson College professor Dr. Tim Chartier’s impact on the Davidson College sports analytics group. Martin Ingram’s paper on Gaussian Process Priors for Dynamic Paired Comparison Modelling.

Check out these Pythons: Aashai Avadhani has constructed visualizations of NBA possessions during the 2015-16 season using Python and data provided by Neil Seward, as well as metrics on positional efficiency on offense and defense.

Your moment of R: Luis Verde applies some biogeography/macroecology methods to spatial shot chart data to find similarities between NBA players’ preferred shot locations. Albert Edwards looks at passing under pressure with StatsBomb data and help from FC_rstats.

Conferences: The Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is March 1-2 in Boston. March 8-10 is the SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix. The Seattle Hockey Analytics Conference (VanHAC moves south of the border for the year) will be held March 8-10.