Sports Analytics Articles

Got your brackets ready? Great! Now’s a perfect time to dig into the nitty gritty of FiveThirtyEight’s March Madness predictions.-FiveThirtyEight

Player data is a staple of modern sports franchises. But this data is collected and profited from without any consent from athletes.-BBC

Datasets don’t get much better than this. The NHL has an undocumented data API with everything from team schedules and rosters to every single shot that was taken on the ice.-Towards Data Science

Tips for getting started in sports analytics.-R Studio Blog

What twelve years of NBA games tell us about when you should be confident during a close game, and when you should be worried.-benn.substack

First, crack the spine (or power up the ebook) on these essential sport analytics tomes. Then, choose your own adventure depending on your interests (baseball? hockey? combat sports?).-Brendan Kent

This R package can run thousands of simulations of the NFL regular season to examine the probability of team making the playoffs or winning the Super Bowl. Your fantasy football league won’t know what hit ‘em.-nflseedR

Anecdotes ruled fantasy football conversations. Then the math nerds crashed the party.-Built In

What skills do you need to develop in order to find a position at a club? To answer that question, you actually need to start with the different types of data available to a football analyst.-Barça Innovation Hub

“It has never been easier for coaches to behave rationally, and yet they still manage to be irrational.”-The Wall Street Journal

A good long read for your commute or Sunday morning.-New York Times Magazine

LeBron’s a free agent and this summer, he’ll pick his next team. What can all 30 NBA teams can offer him in championships and legacy?-FiveThirtyEight

This analysis makes the case that Stephen Curry is a point guard, not just a “shooting guard playing point” because he performs the quintessential responsibility of a point guard—to help his teammates score—better than anybody else in the league this year.-Fansided

Google recently uploaded a ton of data about NCAA games, players, shot locations, and more. This fun analysis is just the tip of iceberg—play around with the massive data set yourself in BigQuery.-Max Woolf

Ben Falk got into basketball analytics in 2002 and watched the field evolve from basically nothing to rendering the NBA unrecognizable. In this AMA he shares how he got started, tactics for communicating analysis to coaches, and why he doesn't like using one-number stats to produce player rankings.-/r/nba

How do you turn data into a baseball stat that not only captures what’s actually happening on the field but also engages the average fan? There are lessons in here about packaging metrics to resonate with your audience— whether they're up in the stands or across the office.-New York Times Magazine

In 2015, the MLB introduced a new metric— the “launch angle.” Since then, batters have become obsessed with hitting higher and harder and baseball saw the biggest surge in home runs since the steroids era. Coincidence? Probably not.-Washington Post

From the outside, crunching numbers for a national sports league seems glamorous. The cold hard truth? It’s an often thankless job with low pay and long hours. The only thing that’ll prevent burnout is a pure love of the game.-StatsbyLopez

To fire or not to fire? When a football team gives their coach the boot, are they better off for it? (Bonus: a nice primer on causal inference.)-StatsbyLopez

If you prefer knock outs to home runs, good news! There’s an entire blog dedicated to Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) analysis. Check out a new way to rank Ultimate Fighting Championship athletes using R.-Fight Prior

When Theo Epstein helped the Red Sox win the World Series in 2004, sabermetrics wasn’t a widespread practice. With the Cubs’ win last week, Epstein ended yet another World Series drought, despite facing analytically savvy opponents.-The Ringer

Here’s a conundrum for you: Charles Reep, the father of soccer analytics, recommended a playing style that’s partially responsible for the Brits playing such a bad football.-FiveThirtyEight

Examine the numbers behind various aspects of marathon performance, including how to avoid hitting the wall, the best indicator of finish time, and how women are more disciplined runners than men.-Running with Data

Improvements in player statistics have created a fun new way to follow soccer, er, “football.” Take a walk through the basic logical process of choosing the right metrics to evaluate player performance. Even non-soccer fans will love the results.-Stats Bomb

Looking for an advantage in your fantasy league this year? Check out our Fantasy Football Draft Dashboard, equipped with everything you need to make a good pick.-Overflow Data

The Olympics are over, but we wanted to squeeze in one last data viz from Rio before the long wait ‘til 2020.-New York Times

No, we’re not talking about the green water hullabaloo. This detailed data exploration covers a different issue: Was there a current in the Rio pool affecting swimmers’ speed?-SwimSwam

Soccer and field hockey keepers have the “easiest” jobs, generally saving around 70 percent of shots.-FiveThirtyEight

The American women’s gymnastics team won the gold with 184.897 points, an 8-point lead over second-best Russia.-New York Times

By charting all of Phelps’s individual race times since Sydney, we can see how his performance has changed over the last 16 years-New York Times

For each sport of the 2016 Games, I looked at the median age of the participants — overall, men and women — using data from athlete profile pages on the Rio 2016 website.-FiveThirtyEight

Just 10 countries — the United States, Australia and eight European nations — earned medals in the first modern Games, in Athens in 1896. More than 100 years later, in Rio, there were 87 medal-winning nations, from Algeria to Vietnam.-New York Times

Nate Silver once wrote 'Sports has awesome data.' But hang on, we need to qualify that: 'Men’s sports has awesome data.' The surprisingly little amount of data collected on women’s sports limits the kinds of stories sports journalists can tell.-How We Get To Next

Many people rely on player rankings to draft their fantasy football teams, but such rankings can’t tell you how much better one player is than another. Instead, dividing players into tiers based on projected scores may be the way to go.-Huey Kwik

Decades after baseball front offices started using data to win games, some golfers are now turning to data to find ways to improve performance and devise course strategy.-Wall Street Journal

A social network analysis of NBA players who have played on the same team.-Fanatics

Take a tour of Kobe Bryant's key shots over his 20-year career, or explore the makes and misses over his long career.-Los Angeles Times

Nylon Calculus shares their thoughts and reactions about biometrics data, human-in-the-loop, and the Moneyball generation.-Nylon Calculus

Here are five trends that emerged in the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference research paper competition.-FiveThirtyEight

Golden State Warriors legend Stephen Curry just can’t stop breaking records, and he hasn’t slowed down all season. Dig into the numbers behind his rise to the top of the NBA leaderboard.-ESPN

A fascinating look at the effect baseball analytics has on how front offices operate, including where analysts sit within the organization, how their specializations have developed, and the evolving relationship between scouts and analysts.-FanGraphs Baseball

A good overview of football and sports analytics as a whole—“I think the general set of analytical skills is sport-agnostic, as it’s more of a way of thinking about how to solve problems with data than about specific subject matter expertise.”-Waiting For Next Year