sports

This explainer video by Vox on the oil patterns on bowling lanes was oddly fascinating. The varying degrees of oil can change a professional bowler’s strategy as a tournament progresses.…

As a Golden State Warriors fan, I am obligated to dislike LeBron James, but there is no denying that he is a great basketball player. James recently passed Michael Jordan…

The choice for Most Valuable Player in the NBA is only minimally about the numbers, but it’s fun to look anyways. FiveThirtyEight makes the case for Stephen Curry. I particularly…

Picking basketball players for a professional team is no easy task. College and high school players picked high in the draft might end up average in the NBA, and those…

Serena Williams, who plays tonight in the U.S. Open semifinal, might be the greatest tennis player of all time. Kyle Kim for the Los Angeles Times provides a numbers rundown…

Despite what commentators and sports analysts might have you think, picking great players in a sports draft is full of uncertainty. A player might be great in college, but the…

Predictions for how NBA players will contribute to their teams, based on their own performance and history.

Damien Saunder, a cartographer at ESRI, likes to use mapping methods to evaluate tennis player patterns and tendencies. When I look at tennis, I see it moving on a grid.…

Because of course.

There's no direct download, but there is an API.

Analytics continues its spread into the various facets of sports. Just recently, the Denver Broncos hired a director of analytics, Mitch Tanney, who will be available to coaches on the…

I was flipping through the channels the other night and happened on the Tour de France. It’s cycling, in case you’re unfamiliar, and it’s not the most interesting sport to…

Hawk-Eye is a collection of technologies that allows high-granularity sports tracking, most notably in tennis. It’s similar to what we see with basketball, football, soccer, and basically every sport where…

I know next to nothing about soccer. Like there’s nothing, and then I’m sitting right there next to it. But, the New York Times provides an explanation of the U.S.…

In football video game Madden, NFL players are scored based on skill, which determines how they play in the game. Neil Paine, with graphics by Reuben Fischer-Baum, describes more than…

Michael Beuoy’s win probability model plotted on FiveThirtyEight starts all NBA teams at a 50% chance of winning. Then the probability of winning a game increases and decreases from there.…

A data-centric look at New England Patriots fumble rates at home made the rounds this week. The most cited tidbit was that there is only a 1 in 16,233 chance…

When a baseball player is hitting well, commentators will sometimes say that it looks like he’s hitting with a bigger bat out there. The ACME Catalog, a creative technology studio,…

George Murphy visualized the results of this year’s skateboarding tournament Battle at the Berrics 7. Even if you don’t like or know anything about skateboarding, this is a fun one…

So here’s a sport I don’t see or hear much about. F1 racing, which requires a different sort of strength and agility than say football or basketball, has a wide…

Kirk Goldsberry, with help from Andy Woodruff, looked at how rebounds work in the NBA from a statistical perspective. When a player shoots the ball and misses, there’s a tendency…

When you hear about sports analytics in the news or when announcers talk about it during a game, it seems like really advanced stuff is going on behind the scenes.…

Leading up to a Nike women’s 10k run, design studio Variable made FuelBand Fibers, an artistic interpretation of a week of activity from seven individuals. To celebrate effort of preparing…

LeBron James decided to head back to Cleveland, so naturally the odds that they win the championship went up. Todd Schneider charted the betting odds as the announcement happened to…

I’m pretty sure xkcd is the only one who gets away with showing player ratings for both basketball and chess players in the same frame, without the y-axis labels. And…

Gregor Aisch for the New York Times explored how the soccer clubs that play all year connect the national teams in this year’s World Cup. The best national teams come…

Football players are getting bigger. Noah Veltman, a developer for the WNYC Data News team, shows by how much through an animated heatmap. Scrub the slider back and forth quickly…

Stephen Pettigrew and Reuben Fischer-Baum, for Regressing, compared 11 million brackets on ESPN.com against those of pundits. To evaluate how much better (or worse) the experts were at predicting this…

With player tracking installed in all of the NBA arenas, the sports analytics folks can essentially replay entire games through data and dissect the many facets of play. Andrew Bergmann…