Bringing order to the court
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...