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The play breakdowns are back. NBA.com finally decided it was time to get their site updated and functioning. I’m still not entirely happy with the way they have set everything up, but the videos are back! Unfortunately, I still do have the ability or willingness to create gifs, which means each play will have a link to the video on NBA.com’s website. So far, I have not figured out how to link directly to the videos so each page take a while to load. Sorry.
Now, basketball.
Guess which player scores based on a screen shot. Keep track of your answers. Pictures are links to video of the play. Don't cheat yourself and watch the video before you play the game.
So long DIon. Its an end to the And ONNNNNNEEEEE era in Oklahoma City and boy was it a ride. It was a dysfunctional, often broken and always exasperating ride, but there was a perpetual line of people ready to get on. The trade for Dion is seen as yet another low point in the Sam Presti trade legacy. Not coincidentally the same people complaining most vocally about the Waiters trade are the same that have at one point in time screamed, "How could you trade James Harden?!", but I digress. Removing the lense of past bias lets take a look at this trade with some hindsight and see how it looks with that 20/20 perspective.
I've always wondered if you could used boxscore statistics to qualify a player's position. It's a meaningless problem to solve in this era of positionless basketball, but it's always interested me. Recently, I acquired access to a robust but easy to use statistical package (Spotfire), and my time spent trying to figure out how to use ggplot in R has dropped significantly. I threw together a small script to scrape some NBA.com data and threw it into Spotfire to see what I could come up with.
I was playing with treemaps to see what I could see, when suddenly I had apparently created a chart that defined positions. Granted, this was not basic boxscore data, it was SportsVu data, but my mind was happy with what I saw. Apparently, average time per touch is a decent position identifier. Check it out. Yeah, there is a finals series going on currently, but it might as well be badminton. I'm done with the 2015-2016 season for the moment. Once the burn has soothed, I'll do some looking back at the season, but it's just too fresh at the moment. So what is left? Something must be left because basketball never stops. The draft. The wonderful wonderful draft.
Truth be told, I am not a draft expert. More than that, I've pretty much never concerned myself with the draft until the night of. So, instead of immediately diving headfirst into a breakdown of every mock on the internet then creating my own I'm going to dig through some history of the draft and get myself up to speed on the little details and interesting factoids I can find. |
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