More defensive fouls in a game typically mean more free throw attempts, which typically means more scoring. This kind of information on defensive violations, as well as many others, can give you more confidence in picking Over/Unders, spreads and projecting player performances.
Provide more context to your audience on what to expect from the officials for each game, and/or explain why a referee may have made a controversial call/no-call based on their tendencies using objective quantitative statistics.
All players are scouted heavily. Now the referees have in-depth stats, too, thanks to our daily scouting reports that reveals how each official ranks calling every violation. Just gaining an edge on a couple of violations per game can result in a few more wins during the season and playoffs.
15-20% of violations are called by two or more refs, which is only detectable through visual review. This makes a big difference in getting serious precision.
Official play-by-play records aren’t always correct. Visual review of every violation ensures better accuracy. We also break out “obvious” fouls from “discretionary” fouls to get a more accurate depiction of each referee’s tendencies on judgment calls.
We break out which refs call illegal screens, a very important violation not provided in official scoring.
Lewis: “What are the biggest inefficiencies in basketball, this unchartered territory, if you could know one thing that you don’t know now, what would it be?”
Cuban: “Referees. Seriously. Think about it…Let’s just use the Vegas line, and pick a game that has 3 points or less. [That’s] two missed calls. Done…There is a scenario in the NBA where you have offensive 3 seconds. There’s an official [in one of our games] who refused to call it. And we knew it. So what did we do?” [Laughter from crowd]
“If you know there’s a ref who’s not good at calling a certain call, or is overly sensitive making a call, would you exploit that? Of course you would exploit that….Absolutely, you can gear your playbook toward who the refs are. And even within a game and in-game adjustments and end of quarter, end of game things. They say, look, this guy is going to swallow his whistle, so you can get ‘handsy’ on the perimeter, whereas if it’s someone else, you want to pull back a little.”
Question: “Did it make a difference to you who was officiating a game?”
Dunleavy: “Yeah, it really did, as far as what kind of game you thought would be called, for sure…”
“I think they (TV analysts) have been programmed to say that no one is supposed to talk about it. That you’re supposed to say the officiating doesn’t matter when we all know it absolutely does….I understand their (referees’) job is hard. I understand officiating is hard, but guess what? So is guarding LaMarcus Aldridge. So is coaching…”
In an unprecedented move, the NBA announced that 25-year veteran official Monty McCutchen will be moving immediately to a supervisory role in the league office to mentor and coach NBA …
In the June 9th, 2014 issue of ESPN the Magazine, writer Peter Keating featured our work in his weekly “Numbers” column.
Here’s a post from May 2014 to show the kind of analysis we’ve done in the past: Long before Chris Paul fouled Russell Westbrook on that 3-point shot with 6 …
The 2014 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference selected our research paper as one of the top 16 papers from over 300 submissions. Consequently, ESPN.com ran a feature article on our …
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