Overview of Sports Analytics and Basketball Data Science with Applications in R

Date:

July 1 to 4. MORNING: 9 to 12 (July 1) and 9 to 13h (July 2, 3, and 4).

Instructor

Marica Manisera and Paola Zuccolotto are, respectively, Associate and Full Professors of Statistics at the University of Brescia (Italy) and carry out scientific research in the field of Statistical Science, both with a methodological and applied approach. Marica Manisera is the Chair of the ISI Special Interest Group in Sport Statistics, to which Paola belongs with an active role in the Management Committee. They are the scientific coordinators of the project “Big Data Analytics in Sports” (BDsports; https://bodai.unibs.it/bdsports/).

In the context of Sports Analytics, they have organized workshops and sessions at international statistical conferences, and they are part of editorial boards of scientific journals, in addition to guest editing Special Issues. They also supervise the Sports section of the “Statistics and Data science” area of the PhD program in Analytics for Economics and Management at the University of Brescia.

Martí Casals

Martí Casals holds a PhD, an MSc in Biostatistics and a BSc in Statistics. Martí works as a full professor of Statistics, Research Methodology and Sport Analytics at the National Institute of Physical Education of Catalonia (INEFC) at University of Barcelona (UB). In addition, he is a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Physical Activity and Sport (CEEAF), belonging to the consolidated research group Sport, Exercise, and Human Movement (SEaHM) of the University of Vic - Central University of Catalonia (UVic - UCC) and he is a part-time professor of biostatistics at the Faculty of Medicine of the UVic-UCC.

He has collaborated as an external researcher at the Australian Centre for Research Injury in Sport and its Prevention (ACRISP). In the sports industry, He has collaborated as a sports statistician at FC Barcelona (2017- 2021) in the Sports Science Department and in the Barça Innovation Hub, a research, development, training and innovation platform of FC. Barcelona, and also as an external biostatistical consultant and Basketball analyst at Memphis Grizzlies of the NBA (2016-2018).

Language

Spanish (July 1) & English (July 2, 3, and 4)

Description

This short course offers instructor-led and hands-on training in sports analytics, specifically focused on basketball analytics, for students, young statisticians, and sports professionals.

It provides an understanding of the concepts of sports and basketball data science by covering basic statistical tools and advanced methods of data analysis, as discussed in the book "Basketball Data Science – with Applications in R" by P. Zuccolotto and M. Manisera (2020) and using the R package BasketballAnalyzeR.

Real examples from NBA data are shown, and small exercises are assigned to students.

Course goals

Introduce participants to the world of sports analytics, showcasing its possibilities, opportunities, and available resources from both a professional and academic perspective.
Specific to Basketball Analytics:
- Knowledge and understanding: learners will acquire the methodological and applied knowledge about the basic statistical concepts of basketball data analysis and will be able to apply such knowledge by means of appropriate software.
- Applying knowledge and understanding: learners will be able to use some of the main exploratory methods of data analysis in order to analyse real basketball data.
- Making judgements: learners will be able to analyse and interpret basketball data and organize results in order to draw conclusions and support basketball technical decisions.
- Communication skills: learners will be able to communicate, to experts and non-experts, data information with the help of outputs from specific software of data analysis and visualization.
- Learning skills: learners will learn how to use the R package to answer research and practical questions about basketball analytics. This can be a starting point to face subsequent research investigations.

Course contents

DAY 1 (3 hours – 1 July). Instructor: Martí Casals

History of Sports Analytics
What is Sports Analytics? Why?
Resources of Sports Analytics
Specializations in sports and data
Technology and Visualization
Types of data, variables, and c-speak
Introduction to Sports statistics, Sports Science, and research. Some real Applications.

DAY 2 ( 4 hours – 2 July). Instructors: Marica Manisera and Paola Zuccolotto

Data science in basketball
Basketball analytics: state of the art
Basketball data
Introduction to the R package BasketballAnalyzeR
Basic statistical analyses using BasketballAnalyzeR (1/2)

DAY 3 (4 hours –3 July). Instructors: Marica Manisera and Paola Zuccolotto

Basic statistical analyses using BasketballAnalyzeR (2/2)
Discovering Patterns in data

DAY 4 (4 hours – 4 July). Instructors: Marica Manisera and Paola Zuccolotto

Statistical analyses of specific interesting game situations

Analysis of game splits
From play-by-play data to boxscores
Analysis of lineups and pairs of players
Impact of the lineup on a single player’s performance
Analysis of clutch moments

Prerequisites

Basic knowledge of statistics and R language

Targeted at

Young statisticians, young researchers in sport statistics, students with basic knowledge of statistics and R language, sports professionals with basic knowledge of statistics and R language.

Evaluation

Some exercise that involve analysis with real data with R packages.

Software requirements

Learners are asked to use their computer with the R package BasketballAnalyzeR already installed (useful information are at https://bodai.unibs.it/bdsports/basketballanalyzer/) Some useful but not necessary readings are:

Paola Zuccolotto and Marica Manisera (2020), Basketball Data Science. With Applications in R. CRC Press.
Marica Manisera, Marco Sandri and Paola Zuccolotto (2019), BasketballAnalyzeR: the R package for basketball analytics. Proceedings of the Conference Smart Statistics for Smart Applications (SIS 2019), Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, 19st-21st June 2019, 395 – 402.