APBRmetrics takes its name from the acronym APBR, which stands for the Association for Professional Basketball Research.

A book which is written by Dean Oliver. In his book , Oliver highlights general strategies for teams when they're winning or losing and what aspects should be the focus in either situation. He describes and quantifies the jobs of team leaders and role players, then discusses the interactions between players and how to achieve the best fit.

Oliver conceptualizes the meaning of teamwork and how to quantify the value of different types of players working together. He examines historically successful NBA teams and identifies what made them so successful: individual talent, a system of putting players together, or good coaching.

A Bayesian network is a probabilistic graphical model that represents a set of variables and their probabilistic independencies.

Bayesian Networks are used in predicting the outcome of sports events

George William “Bill” James is a baseball writer, historian, and statistician whose work has been widely influential. Since 1977, James has written more than two dozen books devoted to baseball history and statistics. His approach, which he termed sabermetrics in reference to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), scientifically analyzes and studies baseball, often through the use of statistical data, in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose. In 2006, Time named him in the Time 100 as one of the most influential people in the world.

In an essay published in the 1984 Abstract, James vented his frustration about Major League Baseball's refusal to publish play-by-play data of every game. James proposed the creation of Project Scoresheet, a network of fans that would work together to collect and distribute this information.
 

Citizen Sports offers a number of web applications that allow for interaction between fans.

Jeffrey Ma co-founded the company in 2004 and is a tireless evangelist for the Citizen Sports mission. He has been the technology lead for two internet startups and was an options trader on the Chicago Board of Options Exchange. He gained notoriety as the protagonist, under the name Kevin Lewis, in the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House, the story of the MIT blackjack team. Jeff Ma is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering. He has reportedly been working for Portland Trail Blazers as a statistical consultant.

A metric that reflects team-specific variation in winning percentage over time and league-specific variation. Based on estimation of a model of the determination of annual attendance in professional baseball during the past 100 years, variation in the CBR explains more of the observed variation in attendance than other alternatives measures of competitive balance, suggesting that CBR is a useful metric.

A unique way of illustrating a revealing summary of a basketball game with a chart showing the point innovative plots which has been presented by Peter H. Westfall in 1990.

The Herfindahl index, also known as Herfindahl-Hirschman Index or HHI, is a measure of the size of firms in relationship to the industry and an indicator of the amount of competition among them.

The Herfindahl Index can be used to measure scoring balances for NBA teams.

To calculate HHI for each team: (1) divide each player's points scored by the total number of points scored by the team, (2) square that result for each player, (3) sum those squares.

The home-court advantage is the net effect of several factors that may have an (generally positive) effect on the play of the home team and an (generally negative) effect on the play of the road team.

Possible Sources of Home Court Advantage in Basketball:

• Psychological support of the fans.

• Comfort of being at home, rather than traveling.

• Referees give home teams the benefit of the doubt?

• Teams are familiar with particulars/eccentricities of their home court.

• Different distributions of rest between home and road teams
  

Calculating The Home Court Advantage:
Subtracting one team’s power rating from another can help predicting point diffential between the two teams. Unless the game is being played at a neutral site the "home court advantage" factor needs to be incorporated for more accurately predicting the point differential of a game.

Knowing the distribution of the teams' home and road performances provides predictive information on estimating home court advantage. The probability of a "random point is picked in the home team's point distribution being greater than the random point picked in road team's point distribution" gives an estimate of the home court advantage.

Download 2009-2010 NBA Schedule in Excel

Matt Winick, who has been the architect of the NBA schedule for more than 20 seasons, is the NBA's vice president of scheduling and game operations. Winick starts it in February. 6 months later, in first week of August, the final schedule is completed.

According to Matt Winick, the NBA sets the league schedule to accomplish both competitive balance and a reduction of costs. The goal of the NBA schedule, as it is constructed, is to be efficient from a competitive standpoint with an indirect consideration of travel costs.

Matt Winick has a complicated system that assigns a point value to each date or series of dates a team makes available. The point system rewards a team for making several consecutive dates available instead of insisting on a particular date. Each time team must amass at least 50 points.

Factors that have an impact on setting NBA schedule can be summarized as follows:

1. NBA SCHEDULING FORMULA

Each team have to play:

• 4 games against the other 4 division opponents, [16 games]
• 4 games against 6 (out-of-division) conference opponents, [24 games]
• 3 games against the remaining 4 conference teams, [12 games]
• 2 games against teams in the opposing conference. [30 games]

A five year rotation determines which out-of-division conference teams are played only 3 times.

2. COURT AVAILABILITY

All teams, about a month before the end of the preceding regular season, have to submit to the NBA office a list of:

• at least 50 dates on which their home court will be available,
• 4 Mondays
• 4 Thursdays (to help TNT plan its telecasts).

3. OFFICIAL BREAKS (on which no games are played)

• Christmas eve,
• The all-star game,
• NCAA championship game,

4. CONFLICTS

The conflicts such as NHL games on the same court have to be resolved.

5. BROADCASTERS

Games can be moved to satisfy the NBA's TV partners (ABC, ESPN and TNT). Game times can be tweaked.

LRMC (Logistic Regression Markov Chain) is a college basketball rankings system designed to use only basic scoreboard data, including which teams played, which team had home court advantage and the margin of victory.

It was originally designed by Joel Sokol and Paul Kvam and has been maintained and improved by Sokol and George Nemhauser, all three optimization and statistics professors in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

A research-driven approach that relies heavily on empirical analysis of player performance.

Oakland Athletics' general manager Billy Beane built successful baseball teams year after year, rather than relying on the gut instincts of old-time scouts, as was standard practice for decades. Writer Micheal Lewis realized another investment game was being played out in baseball, notably by the A's. He gained inside access to A's general manager Billy Beane and got a look at how Beane's value players differently than other teams. In 2003, he wrote a book called Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game

The Oakland organization assesses offensive production differently than others, stressing on-base percentage and power, de-emphasizing stolen bases and putting the ball in play. It has engendered an approach to acquiring talent based as much on statistical achievement as on traditional tools, an approach that has gripped some franchises and galled many traditionalists.

The list includes NBA teams that have analytics departments or have been working with statistical consultants.

Boston Celtics:
Mike Zarren (Asst. Exec. Director of Basketball Operations), David Sparks (Statistical Intern)

Cleveland Cavaliers:
Dan Rosenbaum (Consultant), David Lewin (Basketball Operations Seasonal Assistant)

Dallas Mavericks:
Roland Beech, Wayne Winston (formerly worked for Mavs)

Denver Nuggets:
Dean Oliver (Director of Quantitative Analysis)

Houston Rockets:
Daryl Morey (GM), Sam Hinkie (VP of B. Op.), Ed Kupfer (Consultant), Eli Witus (B. Op. Analyst)

Indiana Pacers:
Kevin Pelton (Consultant)

Memphis Grizzlies:
Aaron Barzilai (Quantitative Analyst)

Oklahoma City:
Rich Cho (Assistant GM), Ben Alamar (Consultant), Jesse Weinstein-Gould (B.Op. Asst.)

Orlando Magic:
Charles Klask (Scouting Information Manager)

Portland Trail Blazers:
Justin Kubatko (Consultant), Ben Falk (Consultant), Jeff Ma (Consultant) Ryan Parker (Intern)

San Antonio Spurs:
Gabe Farkas (Consultant)

Toronto Raptors:
Alex Rucker (Consultant)

With the Pro Basketball Forecast, John Hollinger takes an in-depth and insightful look at the game. Downplayed are all the per-game statistics; in their place are points, rebounds, and assists per forty minutes. Hollinger also examines how many possessions each player uses and what percentage of his team's rebounds he collects.

Regression to the mean refers to the fact that those with extreme scores on any measure at one point in time will, for purely statistical reasons, probably have less extreme scores the next time they are tested. Scores always involve a little bit of luck. Real situations fall between these two extremes: scores are a combination of skill and luck.

How it applies to basketball statistics is, any athlete who posts a significant outlier, whether as a rookie or particularly after their prime years can be expected to perform more in line with their established standards of performance.

Statistical analysts have long recognized the effect of regression to the mean in sports; they even have a special name for it: the "Sophomore Slump". For example, Carmelo Anthony had an outstanding rookie season in 2004. It was so outstanding, in fact, that he couldn't possibly be expected to repeat it in 2005. Anthony's numbers had slightly dropped from his torrid rookie season. John Hollinger has an alternate name for the law of regression to the mean: the "fluke rule", while Bill James calls it the "Plexiglass Principle".

Regression to the mean in sports performance produced the "Sports Illustrated Jinx" superstition, in all probability. Athletes believe that being on the cover of Sports Illustrated jinxes their future performance, where this apparent jinx was an artifact of regression.

Founded in 1999, Cambridge, Mass.-based StratBridge, Inc. designs and develops a wide range of sophisticated business analysis solutions to provide decision-makers with both new, unique perspectives on critical issues, as well as valuable insights from information already available to them.

For example, StratBridge provides instant analytics solutions that enable business people and professional sports managers to perform exhaustive diligence research at the touch of a button. StratBridge.net visually renders it in high-resolution plasma displays, Internet browsers or Microsoft Office applications. A variety of customers, including professional sports franchises, institutional and individual investors, consultants and business leaders, are now using StratBridge solutions to quickly understand complex data patterns.

Most NBA teams use Synergy’s professional content delivery network to enjoy instant video streaming playback via queried statistical displays. Tools available to client teams include a fully integrated video editing system that combines downloaded and locally captured video, the local storage of all content to a caching server to allow multiple users to view content with only moderate Internet bandwidth, client tagging options to automate custom edits, video transfer to iPod/DVD/PC/cellular and a host of other essential solutions.