Friday, March 9, 2012

Mapping March Madness

While I'm not much of a sports fan, I can certainly appreciate a convergence of geography and multi-billion dollar sports industries.  For example,  here is a map showing both the number of shots taken from various places on the court during NBA games from 2006-2011, and also the success rate of those shots:

And the same kind of map for an individual player,

Now, as the article I found these in suggests, imagine overlaying all of these plots for all the players on a team and make a team that knows how to distribute its players to most effectively shoot from any position on the court. This is the work of Kirk Goldsberry, an assistant professor of geography at Michigan State (and currently a visiting scholar at Harvard).

No comments:

Post a Comment