Bringing order to the court

Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - 00:30 in Mathematics & Economics

Luke Bornn isn’t the coach of a top-flight NBA team, a general manager with an eye for talent, or an agent representing the next up-and-coming superstar. In fact, he’s only recently become a basketball fan. But Bornn, an assistant professor of statistics, is part of a team of Harvard researchers poised to rewrite the rules of how coaches, players, and fans think about the game. Using a massive database tracking every possession of every game played in the National Basketball Association, the team developed a new metric — expected possession value, or EPV — to help coaches and players evaluate the fraction-of-a-second decisions that happen on the court. The researchers are Bornn; Kirk Goldsberry, an associate of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science; and Ph.D. students Dan Cervone and Alex D’Amour. The work was presented at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference this past weekend.   “Until now, we were relying on data...

Read the whole article on Harvard Science

More from Harvard Science

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net