Sports on Paper
9 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 13 ratingsA deep dive into sports analytics research. Hosted by Canzhi Ye, former Brooklyn Nets basketball analytics associate.
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Episodes
8 - Kostya Medvedovsky, DARKO and assorted NBA analytics topics
January 26, 2022 07:08 - 2 hours - 131 MBI was joined by Kostya Medvedovsky, the creator of the basketball projection system DARKO. We went into the weeds about the methodology behind DARKO and answered questions from Twitter about it. We then picked Kostya's brain on a wide range of NBA analytics ideas, mostly focused on topics that involve predicting things. Finally, we answered some more questions from Twitter. You can find Kostya on twitter: @kmedved [00:00:00] - DARKO [00:05:05] - exponential decay [00:08:10] - kalman filte...
7 - Udit Ranasaria, Passing Value in Expectation
March 03, 2021 05:55 - 1 hour - 134 MBI was joined by Udit Ranasaria who was part of a team that worked on the Passing Value in Expectation project for the Big Data Bowl. They went deep into the tracking data and built physics-based models for ball and player trajectory to estimate passing value, for all possible passes - not just the ones that happened. We also opined on the state of public tracking data based sports analytics, and Udit touched on some exciting new projects in the works. You can find him on twitter @uditranasar...
6 - Asmae Toumi, Tony ElHabr, Marschall Furman, and Sydney Robinson, Weighted Assessment of Defender Effectiveness (Big Data Bowl WINNERS!)
February 23, 2021 14:54 - 1 hour - 88.3 MBIn this episode, I was joined by the winners of the Big Data Bowl 2021, although we recorded this well before the results were announced. We talked about their project called Weighted Assessment of Defender Effectiveness which uses tracking data to allocate credit to individual defenders in coverage on pass plays. We touch on what it was like to work on a data project with others virtually during a pandemic before going deep on methods for defensive target probability over expectation (dTPOE...
5 - Alex Stern, Algorithms in the War Room
January 27, 2021 04:09 - 49 minutes - 68.1 MBI was joined by Alex Stern, a current data science master's student and football analytics researcher at the University of Virginia. We talk about his Big Data Bowl project that goes to beyond the box score to quantify the value of defensive backs. The work extends upon the winning Big Data Bowl project from last year to include some cool Bayesian hierarchical models. The project: https://www.kaggle.com/acs4wq/algorithms-in-the-war-room
4 - Charlie Gelman, Hip Reaction Time (Big Data Bowl), wrestling analytics
January 21, 2021 21:41 - 1 hour - 89.5 MBI was joined by Charlie Gelman, a recent computer science and stats graduate from Duke. We talk about his Big Data Bowl project about defensive backs playing in press man coverage. Bonus segment at the end about wrestling analytics. 0:24 Intro, background 4:00 Paper 54:00 Wrestling analytics The project: https://www.kaggle.com/charlesgelman/hip-reaction-drill
3 - Dani Chu, NFL Route Identification
August 08, 2019 21:52 - 1 hour - 91.7 MBI was joined by Dani Chu, a graduate student in statistics at Simon Fraser University and part of the team that won the NFL's inaugural Big Data Bowl. We talk about his fascinating research done on NFL tracking data to identify routes. We also speculate and think wishfully about the metrics that could be developed if the tracking data were to ever become public. The paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.02423 The Josh Hermsmeyer article we mentioned: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/can-nf...
2 - Kanaad Parvate, NBA shot policies, MDPs, Reinforcement Learning, etc
July 11, 2019 00:20 - 51 minutes - 48 MBMy guest today is Kanaad. He is a friend of mine from Berkeley, and he is a Cavs and RL enthusiast. We talk about a fascinating paper from the 2018 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The main idea is that by modeling each possession as a Markov Decision Process, it becomes easy to build a simulator that can help us answer questions like "How much more efficient would a team be if they took 20% fewer midrange shots early in the shot clock?" The paper: http://www.lukebornn.com/papers/sandho...
1 - Ryan Davis, Adjusted Plus-Minus and Friends
June 28, 2019 04:40 - 1 hour - 91.2 MBA discussion with Twitter friend Ryan Davis (@rd11490) of a seminal paper in the field of NBA analytics, "Improved NBA Adjusted +/- Using Regularization and Out-of-Sample Testing." Afterwards, we share ideas on ways to further improve RAPM. (00:00) paper discussion (29:00) additional topics on player evaluation with RAPM framework Paper: http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/joeSillSloanSportsPaperWithLogo.pdf RAPM tutorial: https://twitter.com/rd11490/status/112878...
0 - Hello World!
June 21, 2019 07:59 - 1 minute - 2.1 MBIntroducing the Sports on Paper podcast, hosted by Canzhi Ye. First real episode coming soon... Follow the pod on twitter @sportsonpaper!