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Modeling Offensive Player Movement in Professional Basketball

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  • Steven Wu
  • Luke Bornn

Abstract

The 2013 arrival of SportVU player tracking data in all NBA arenas introduced an overwhelming amount of on-court information—information which the league is still learning how to maximize for insights into player performance and basketball strategy. The data contain the spatial coordinates for the ball and every player on the court for 25 frames per second, which opens up avenues of player and team performance analysis that was not possible before this technology existed. This article serves as a step-by-step guide for how to leverage a data feed from SportVU for one NBA game into visualizable components that can model any player's movement on offense. We detail some utility functions that are helpful for manipulating SportVU data before applying it to the task of visualizing player offensive movement. We conclude with visualizations of the resulting output for one NBA game, as well as what the results look like aggregated across an entire season for three NBA stars with very different offensive tendencies.

Suggested Citation

  • Steven Wu & Luke Bornn, 2018. "Modeling Offensive Player Movement in Professional Basketball," The American Statistician, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 72(1), pages 72-79, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:amstat:v:72:y:2018:i:1:p:72-79
    DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2017.1395365
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Daniel Cervone & Alex D’Amour & Luke Bornn & Kirk Goldsberry, 2016. "A Multiresolution Stochastic Process Model for Predicting Basketball Possession Outcomes," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 111(514), pages 585-599, April.
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    Cited by:

    1. Paola Zuccolotto & Marco Sandri & Marica Manisera, 2021. "Spatial Performance Indicators and Graphs in Basketball," Social Indicators Research: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, Springer, vol. 156(2), pages 725-738, August.
    2. Pierpalo D’Urso & Livia Giovanni & Vincenzina Vitale, 2023. "A Bayesian network to analyse basketball players’ performances: a multivariate copula-based approach," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 325(1), pages 419-440, June.
    3. Paola Zuccolotto & Marco Sandri & Marica Manisera, 2023. "Spatial performance analysis in basketball with CART, random forest and extremely randomized trees," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 325(1), pages 495-519, June.

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