Harvard Sports Analysis Collective

Regarding: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/sports/ncaabasketball/16score.html?_r=1&ref=sports
  ————— 
If the Berger-Pope study (NY Times, March 15) becomes widely accepted, we eventually will see accounts like this.
                             WILEY’S BRILLIANT PLOY
Battling against University’s fabulous five for the National Championship, State trailed by a single point as halftime approached.  We know from Berger and Pope’s work that wins stem more often from one point […]

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Rondo’s Triple 14.
Rajon Rondo’s triple double Wed night in Boston’s comeback win
over Dallas involved 19 points, 15 rebounds, and 14 assists.  His
“max-min” of 14 (14 maximizes the minimum category) means he
actually actually had a “triple 14″.

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My below response is regarding an HSAC discussion about ‘proportional point-spread hypothesis’ that we’ve been having over the past several days.  It started as follows: Professor Morris, inspired by the early lead Arizona took over the Eagles, posed a question regarding point spreads, specifically, how the points should be thought of as being distributed over […]

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Chris Paul (New Orleans) just set the streak record for steals.  He “only” averaged 2.69 steals, so how did he avoid games with 0 steals?  If the Poisson distribution applies, mean 2.69 steals/game = 285 steals/106 games, he should have had about 7 games with no steals in 106 games. But he had none.  Zero!  […]

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Mike Zarren, JD ‘04, Assistant Executive Director of Basketball Operations/Associate Counsel of the NBA Champion Boston Celtics, spoke to a group of HSAC members this past Wednesday night in Winthrop House.
Mike spoke about his role with the team, the use of statistical analysis in professional basketball, and also provided advice and background regarding the process […]

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Here’s an article written by a couple of our members, Haibo Lu ‘08 and Alex Ahmed ‘10, for our biweekly column in the Harvard weekly paper, The Harvard Independent (www.harvardindependent.com).  The type of prediction probability scoring that is discussed in the article is not limited to the NCAA basketball tournament - it has a lot of interesting applications.  Look for more on […]

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Growing up, I always had a special affinity for point guards.  They were the “floor generals,” or the quarterbacks of the basketball team, and were thus in the driver’s seat for every offensive possession.  I was somewhat indifferent to the other positions, as I knew for a fact that the point guard was the most […]

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I was quoted by Alan Schwarz in his NY Times Sports article
Jan 29, 2008 about a 1/29,000 chance of a 3-team trifecta in
one city.   Click here for the article.
Alan and I both have been asked about this number,
    E.g.   “Where did the “1-in-29,000 come from?
            Is that based on winning the championship,
            having the best […]

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This may be premature, but it looks like a little known streak here at Harvard may be coming to an end. For the last two season, Harvard Men’s Basketball garnered at least one vote in the Top 25 AP Rankings in the first few weeks of the year. It might not have been much, […]

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Boston sports fans have been experiencing the most astonishing simultaneous run ever by one city’s professional baseball, football, and basketball teams.
Today, and for some weeks now, the Red Sox, Patriots, and Celtics all have and have held their league’s best (and unshared) won/lost record. With 30, 32, and 30 teams in these leagues, that combination […]

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