What is a Floor Raiser in the NBA? What is a Ceiling Raiser?

A thought experiment into what makes NBA players floor raisers or ceiling raisers and how these skillsets differ.

7 Types of Offense in the 24-25 NBA Season

The latest in my series of categorizing NBA teams with k-means. For last season's offenses, see here. I've listed seven categories in increasing order of their average Offensive Ratings. Interestingly, every category had some standout strengths and weaknesses, even the worst and the best, and the best offenses weren't necessarily the ones playing the most…

How voters vote in Approval Voting Elections

Approval voting offers voters the freedom to vote for however many candidates they want. But how do approval elections play out in real life? Do voters take advantage of the ability to vote for multiple candidates? How many candidates do they vote for? The real-world impact of Approval voting compared to other voting systems is…

The gap between good and bad NBA draft classes is huge

This year's NBA draft is not expected to be good. But what would that mean? How much worse is a "bad" draft than a "good" draft? Quantifying the Best and Worst NBA Drafts To help get a more objective measure of each draft class's quality, I've pulled the total career win shares for the top…

Categorizing sports team performance & strategy with k-means

I've done several projects using k-means clustering to categorize NBA teams. I go into more detail about the method and general lessons I learned about k-means' usefulness for analytics. K-means as a way to quickly probe open questions Data-based categories of NBA teams could be useful for front offices, betters, or just anyone who wants…

7 Kinds of Defenses in the 23-24 NBA Season

I've used k-means clustering to categorize NBA offenses and even to track how NBA offenses have changed over the last decade. Defense has famously been harder to statistically analyze than offense; think of this categorization of defenses as being a "rough draft" at figuring out how useful k-means might be at helping us understand NBA…

Finding Super Smash Bros Melee’s Ideal Character Play Rates with Game Theory

From aMSa vs Mang0 Big House 10 Grand Finals Matchup Charts & Game Theory Game theory offers tools for determining how often different strategic choices should be made. However, using it to help you make decisions for real games, like deciding what character to play in Super Smash Bros, is rarely straightforward. Inserting the strategic…

7 Kinds of NBA Offenses in the 2023-24 Season

I've had some fun categorizing last season's offenses with machine learning and even looking back further at the past several years to see how offenses have changed and what teams have stood out the most (i.e. the Golden State Warriors). I figured All-Star break would be a good time to look at this season's offenses…

Analyzing the NBA Offensive Revolution with Machine Learning

Categorizing 8 years of NBA offenses Much ink has been spilled over the NBA's analytics revolution, most of which has been focused on the consequences of teams fully realizing that 3 pointers are worth 150% as much as 2 pointers. I've previously looked at categorizing offenses from the 22-23 season with machine learning. The same…

The best Pokemon type combinations according to game theory

Finding the Best Pokemon Types A couple of years have passed since I used game theory to find the best Pokemon type, time I spent enjoying the vast riches that this discovery has brought me, sleeping soundly knowing that the world was safe from worrying about what Pokemon type is the best, as I had…