New Study Identifies NBA Players Who Shoot Too Much

To reach the NBA Finals, Russell Westbrook of the Oklahoma City Thunder needs to pass more, especially to his teammate Kevin Durant.  That would be the message that two researchers would send to Thunder coach, Scott Brooks, if given the chance.  Matt Goldman, a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, and Justin Rao, a research scientist at Yahoo Labs recently named Westbrook as the biggest “chucker” in the NBA because of statistics showing that he shoots much more often than he should, while Durant is classified as an undershooter, whose team would benefit from him taking more chances.


While their statistical theory builds a case for how to achieve optimal efficiency on the court, they don’t explain why elite players make the in-game decisions that they do.  For that matter, what about the high school ball player or the weekend warrior at the gym; how do they make the decision to pass or shoot?  For that, Markus Raab and Joseph Johnson, both sport scientists, have some insights  from their research.


First, let’s do the numbers.  Goldman and Rao dug into the NBA stats archive to analyze over 400,000 team possessions over the last four seasons, 2006-2010, across the entire league.  In a paper and presentation at the recent MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, they presented a model that compares the difficulty of a shot taken in relation to the time remaining on the 24 second shot clock.  Then they compare this with a concept called “allocative efficiency”, or the benefit of equally distributing the ball to any of the five players on the court and also “dynamic efficiency”, or deciding whether to “use” the possession by taking a shot or “continuing” the possession by making a pass.  As the shot clock winds down, the marginal difficulty of a shot considered will need to rise or they risk getting no shot off before the 24 seconds expires, wasting the possession.

Please continue reading >>

Predicting NFL Success By What Draft Picks Say

Thankfully, the NFL Draft and all its hype is behind us.  The matchmaking is complete but the guessing game begins as to which team picked the right combination of athletic skill, mental toughness and leadership potential in their player selections.  Hundreds of hours of game film can be broken down to grade performance with X’s and O’s.  Objective athletic tests at the NFL combine rank the NCAA football draftees by speed and strengths, just as the infamous Wonderlic intelligence test tries to rank their brain power.  

However, despite all of this data, coaches and general managers often point to a player’s set of fuzzy personal qualities, dubbed the “intangibles”, as the ultimate tie-breaking determinant to future success in the league.

Always looking for the edge in this crystal ball forecasting, teams are turning to other technologies and methods that have been used in related assessment arenas in business and politics.  As any good self-improvement speaker will tell you, success leaves clues.  By studying established leaders, certain traits, attitudes and themes can be identified as consistent “bread crumbs” left behind for others to follow.  In the same way, potential leaders that don’t pan out also demonstrate patterns of behavior that can be linked to their less-than-hyped performance.

Please continue reading >>

Running Out Of Memory

Diane Van Deren

While the idea of running a marathon seems life-changing in a “bucket list” kind of way, the drudgery of a serious training plan can generate some second thoughts.  Even though the details of the weekday workouts vary, the one staple of most plans is the weekend “long run.”  Consisting of progressively more miles as race day nears, these runs of 15+ miles train not only the legs and heart but also the brain.  Breaking through mental barriers and learning how to deal with fatigue helps the marathoner talk back to his or her body and helps them get over the inevitable psychological wall during the race.  

In fact, our brains can offer us too much information during those hours on the road.  Knowing that you just started mile three of an 18 mile training run can be just as difficult as approaching mile 15 exhausted but having to dig deep for three more.  What if you could turn your brain off and just deal with the current moment; no looking back or forward?  It is something Diane Van Deren lives with every day.

One of the world’s best ultra-runners (as in races of 50 miles or more), Van Deren puts in more miles on her feet during a week than many cyclists do in the saddle.  She is a veteran and champion of some of the world’s toughest 50 mile, 100 kilometer and 100 mile races.

But Van Deren fights her own personal battle every day.  In 1997, after suffering for years from epileptic seizures, she made the tough decision to undergo a lobectomy.  By isolating and removing a damaged kiwi-size portion of the right temporal lobe of her brain, the seizures stopped but so did significant pieces of her short term memory.  Beyond just embarrassing lapses of names and faces, Van Deren would lose keys, directions and experiences before they could be filed away into her long term memory archive.

Please continue reading >>