The Roar
The Roar

Advertisement

Are Australian sports missing the boat on analytics?

30th May, 2014
Advertisement
Roar Guru
30th May, 2014
11
1396 Reads

On Wednesday night we were lucky enough to witness a grown man – a professional football player no less – wearing a bra.

Of course, the bra was not actually a bra. The bra was a piece of kit designed to record just about every measurable known to man about Trent Hodgkinson’s physical performance.

Data captured by the bra is used to try and improve any future performances. This is sports science.

Sports science has become murky water to swim in following the ‘Blackest Day in Australian sport’ announcement last year.

However, another type of science involving fewer peptides is beginning to take a foothold in professional sports.

Sports analytics gained mainstream recognition when Brad Pitt became Billy Beane in Moneyball, with Hollywood shining a spotlight on sabermetrics and the maths behind winning at sport.

For those who haven’t seen Moneyball, it’s about baseball club finds way to succeed against rich baseball clubs by identifying a specific skill that is undervalued – how often a batter gets to first base – and choosing players based on that skill.

The key word in the sports analytics field is ‘undervalued’. As an organisation, it’s pointless to exploit something that is valued by everyone.

Advertisement

Baseball is unique because it’s extremely quantifiable. Every at-bat in baseball is a sentence within the larger chapter of a game. Each sentence can be broken down to reveal its minutiae with relative ease.

Analytics is now developing within more complex sports. The NBA is currently deep into the playoffs and basketball is having its own spotlight moment, with analytics theorists trying to identify and unlock the secrets to success.

Basketball is fluid, messy and complex. Unlike baseball, there aren’t clear-cut stop-start pieces of the game that can be broken down and mined for data easily.

In order to understand what elements of the game are undervalued when it comes to scoring the most points, analysts have had to develop new things to measure.

Of all the new metrics that analysts have come up with to try and understand what gives a team the best chance to win, the most interesting is Expected Possession Value or EPV.

EPV was created by two smart kids from Harvard. It’s designed to give an indication of how many points are likely to be scored at any given point in time during a game of basketball, and it’s incredible.

EPV uses ridiculous amounts of data about individual players with the ball (scoring/passing/assist efficiency), teammates on the court (same deal), and where everyone is positioned on the court (technology is awesome). It requires a Harvard supercomputer to then calculate all these variables into a number between 0 and 3 – the EPV.

Advertisement

I’m no Harvard supercomputer, but basically it works like this. Your team just inbounded the ball to a point guard on your own baseline? EPV is pretty close to zero right now.

Your team just inbounded the ball to an open Lebron James standing under the bucket? That EPV is as close to 2 as it can get. (You can read a more thorough explanation of EPV over at Grantland.)

In theory, if trends in EPV are monitored for long enough, teams work out the most effective way of scoring and defending. And winning.

EPV is far from perfected. At this point it’s better to think of it as a conceptual tool rather than a statistical certainty, but concepts like this will be the future. And in the future of sports, knowledge will be power.

In the US, there’s an analytics ‘community’ that share ideas and theories. There are annual sports analytics conferences. It’s normal for professional sporting teams to have people whose job is analytics. If you’re not trying to find the next piece of undervalued information that will help you win, you’re being left behind.

So are we missing a trick in Australian sports?

Basketball is one thing, but would it even be possible to quantify a player’s EPV at any given point within a game of Australian Rules football or rugby league?

Advertisement

Maybe it’s time sporting teams in Australia stopped putting bras on players, stopped looking at outdated Supercoach stats and started searching for something new and undervalued instead.

close