Posts Tagged ‘ stats ’

0
27
Jan

Stats 1.0

I finally got the site up to a baseline level of completeness in terms of the stats database and the various graphs and box scores that it populates. We now have full sized graphs that pop out if you click on any of the sparklines on the left, and I’ve added trendlines to the big graphs that are explained at the top of the Stats page (and if anyone knows where I can find points off turnovers averages by team, please let me know in the comments).

I also updated the Schedule box scores to link back to the recap for each of the already-played games, and the same is now appearing in the “2010-11 Meetings” boxes on the game previews.

This completes the opening phase in building out the stats infrastructure, which unfortunately is limited to just the team stats (I’m entering the stats manually after each game, so doing player stats would be prohibitive — something for next year perhaps if I can find a comprehensive database to access). But if there’s anything else you’d find interesting as an addition to the site, or if you notice any errors, please drop a note in comments and I’ll see what I can do!

(And apologies to anyone who has noticed the slow site response times in recent weeks — it appears to be a hosting issue (though I can’t completely rule out my PHP code), so I might need to change the site host to get that fixed completely. Unfortunately, that’s not something I’ll be able to get to for a while.)

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13
Jan

Scoring by quarter

When looking at the scoring by quarter data on our revamped Stats page something looked odd to me. Scoring by quarter did not appear to be randomly distributed. With the season approaching the 50% mark I thought I would do some very basic analysis to see if my eyes were lying to me. Short story: maybe, maybe not. There are slight differences in scoring by quarter and we can make some statements about trends but strictly speaking differences are are not significantly significant (p<0.05) although it would have been pretty shocking if they had been.

First, the Warriors’s scoring by quarter in a boxplot. For those unfamiliar there are a few basic things you can take away from a boxplot. The box contains the 50% of the data set. The lower (left) edge of the box represents the 25th percentile and the upper (right) edge of the box represents the 75th percentile. The line in the box is the median, meaning half the data points lie above it and half lie below it. A tighter box means a tighter data set and less variability. A median line off center of the box suggests a bias in the data. The whiskers are 1.5 times the Inter-quartile range and any circles are further outliers.

The Warrior’s points by quarters boxplot through the 1/12/11 Laker’s game:

What does this graph tell us? The 3rd quarter tends to be their most consistent quarter from game to game. Pretty damn tight. The first quarter is their highest scoring quarter by a small margin, but when they suck in the 1st they can suck all the way down the spectrum. Look how skewed the box is in regards to the median. That is a wide range of below median scoring. The 4th quarter may be their most inconsistent quarter, but I imagine it may be that was for a lot of teams especially if you are on either side of a blow out, but that is pure speculation.

What about the Warriors’s defense, looking at opponent scoring by quarter?

The Warriors’s defense is pretty bad in the 1st quarter. It is on the edge of actually being statistically significant from the second quarter when their defense improves (almost significantly!). Interestingly their 3rd quarter defense is the most consistent just like their offense. If only games contained 3rd quarters and nothing else.

Overall their defense is less sporadic than their offense. The Warriors are streaky shooters, but their opponents don’t tend to be, at least when they are playing the Warriors.

UPDATE: Season +/- by quarter below. Their most consistent 3rd quarter is actually their second worst by the +/-, so really they need to play all 2nd quarter games. I guess their defense is just that much better in the second and the key to scoring differential may lie in their defense rather than their offense.

Season Avg -2.3 0.1 -1.7 -0.5