In the age of Big Data, the term analytics gets tossed around a lot, especially in the world of sports. Analytics insights from sports range from the truly strange, such as the fact the pro tennis player who grunts the most effectively tends to win, to the genuinely game-changing, such as NBA teams changing their season long approach to player rest. If so many sports are seen as games of inches, what might seem like a rounding error may in fact be the difference between victory and defeat. Let’s take a look at some ways data analytics as a field is being leveraged in professional sports.
Missile-Tracking in the NBA
STATS SportVu is a system that’s based on existing missile-tracking technologies, and it’s a popular choice across many North American sports leagues for recording the positions of every player and the ball. It has become especially popular in the NBA, where it is being used to track where players take their shots, how they come into the offensive or defensive zone and how likely they are to succeed or fail. Teams decide one-on-one match-ups based on this information, and the teams that process the data most effectively tend to win. It’s not …
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