by Kael Ecord, School of Informatics graduate student
My project was titled “The Crumbs: Examining Offensive Rebound and Forced Turnover Success Rate”. The goal of my project was to use college basketball data from all games played by Big 12 Conference teams from 2018-19 through 2023-24 to create two new metrics. The first being offensive rebound success rate and the second being forced turnover success rate. The goal of creating these new statistics was to create a way for teams, fans, and media members to quantify the value of a team’s offensive rebound. This was accomplished by analyzing how often a team was successful after securing an offensive rebound or forcing a turnover.
ANALYSIS
To analyze the data, I looked through each game’s play-by-play data to find an occurrence of an offensive rebound or forced turnover by the team of interest. After finding this play, I looked at the next play in the game in order to determine whether the team that secured the offensive rebound or forced the turnover was successful at scoring points in the first action after doing so. Aggregating this information across the length of the game and season, while also keeping track of descriptive data for each occurrence allowed me to create visualizations and team leaderboards across seasons to find the best teams at each of these new statistics.
On both the game-by-game level and overall season win total, increasing your offensive rebound success rate and forced turnover success rate leads to more wins. For example, in Kansas’ ten lowest performing games in terms of offensive rebound success rate they only won 3 of those games. The 7 losses included 4 blowouts, 2 upset losses in the NCAA tournament, and 1 home loss to an unranked conference team.
In the scatter plots below along with the results of a simple linear regression I found that as offensive rebound success rate and forced turnover success rate increase the average season wins also increases.
Figure 1
Offensive Rebound Success Rate vs Wins (scatter plot and linear regression results)
Figure 2
Forced Turnover Success Rate vs Wins (scatter plot and linear regression results)
Using this data, we can see where teams most often force turnovers and where teams have success converting on these turnover and offensive rebounds. These visuals can help coaches prepare teams for these scenarios, which are generally unpredictable and chaotic scrambles to get reorganized. The shot chart and heat map below show what happens after Kansas secured an offensive rebound.
Figure 3
Offensive Rebound Next Play Shot Chart and Heatmap from KU vs Missouri (2023-24)
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This next shot chart and heat map shows where Kansas forces turnovers and which ones lead to successful next possessions (scoring points on the next play). Once again this can be very useful in the scouting process for both Kansas and their upcoming opponent. For Kansas, it can show where they should be trying to force players to not only force a turnover, but also set themselves up for success on the next possessions. For the opponent these can outline Kansas’ overall defensive strategy of where they are trying to force players so they can find other areas to attack.
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Figure 4
Forced Turnover Location Shot Chart and Heatmap from KU vs Indiana (2023-24)
Figure 5
Forced Turnover Next Play Shot Chart and Heatmap from KU vs Indiana (2023-24)
REFLECTION
When presenting my primary focus was to clearly articulate what I had done and how it can be beneficial for multiple users. I tried to keep in mind that all the people attending the presentation had little to no prior knowledge of what I had been building. This was super important for me to focus on as I didn’t want to gloss over something that I found to common sense that only was so because I knew my project inside and out. In a similar vein, I also wanted to be clear and concise so I could show off everything I did in my project, so the audience got the full picture of my project and not just the main bullet points.
I felt great after presenting, because I finally got to show other people what I had spent so much time working on. I also love presentations, because I feel like I get in a groove of where I want to go with the project and focus solely on those ideas, but the audience always brings great ideas to continue making the project better that never would have crossed my mind. This always makes me realize the importance of working with groups of people that have different perspectives. It is always a little scary putting your work out there, but getting to talk with industry professionals about things they liked and ideas for improvement is extremely valuable information for me moving forward in my academic career and professional career.
This project was a perfect opportunity to showcase my ability to use my knowledge of sports, data, and coding to create something of value to a lot of people in the sports data community. As someone who wants to end up in the sports world working on projects like these for a professional organization, I got to use real world data unlike anything you can find. I was also able to use a lot of different tools that I had learned to create something from the ground up that I created, which was really fulfilling. Finally, presenting for an audience that isn’t as knowledgeable about data and everything that goes into a project like this is always incredibly valuable as it allowed me to work on effectively communicating my work so they could understand what I did and how it could be used in the future.
The most important part of any of these projects is for them to have a larger impact than something cool that sits on your computer and collects technological dust. I truly believe that the outcome of this project will not only lead to wonderful opportunities for myself, but also the Sports Analytics program. Being able to come out of this summer with a project that I can take so much pride in is extremely valuable not only for my resume, future job opportunities, but also for my confidence that I can produce quality work. The most satisfying part of the summer project was presenting my hard work and seeing other people find value and be interested in something I spent my summer working on.
#SportsInnovation #SportsAnalytics #Indy4Sports
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