I was joined by Kostya Medvedovsky, the creator of the basketball projection system DARKO. We went into the weeds about the methodology behind DARKO and answered questions from Twitter about it. We then picked Kostya's brain on a wide range of

7 - Udit Ranasaria, Passing Value in Expectation

Mar 3rd, 2021 1h 37m

I was joined by Udit Ranasaria who was part of a team that worked on the Passing Value in Expectation project for the Big Data Bowl. They went deep into the tracking data and built physics-based models for ball and player trajectory to estimate

6 - Asmae Toumi, Tony ElHabr, Marschall Furman, and Sydney Robinson, Weighted Assessment of Defender Effectiveness (Big Data Bowl WINNERS!)

Feb 23rd, 2021 1h 4m

In this episode, I was joined by the winners of the Big Data Bowl 2021, although we recorded this well before the results were announced. We talked about their project called Weighted Assessment of Defender Effectiveness which uses tracking dat

5 - Alex Stern, Algorithms in the War Room

Jan 27th, 2021 49m 35s

I was joined by Alex Stern, a current data science master's student and football analytics researcher at the University of Virginia. We talk about his Big Data Bowl project that goes to beyond the box score to quantify the value of defensive ba

4 - Charlie Gelman, Hip Reaction Time (Big Data Bowl), wrestling analytics

Jan 21st, 2021 1h 5m

I was joined by Charlie Gelman, a recent computer science and stats graduate from Duke. We talk about his Big Data Bowl project about defensive backs playing in press man coverage. Bonus segment at the end about wrestling analytics.0:24 Intro

3 - Dani Chu, NFL Route Identification

Aug 8th, 2019 1h 6m

I was joined by Dani Chu, a graduate student in statistics at Simon Fraser University and part of the team that won the NFL's inaugural Big Data Bowl. We talk about his fascinating research done on NFL tracking data to identify routes. We also

2 - Kanaad Parvate, NBA shot policies, MDPs, Reinforcement Learning, etc

Jul 11th, 2019 51m 51s

My guest today is Kanaad. He is a friend of mine from Berkeley, and he is a Cavs and RL enthusiast. We talk about a fascinating paper from the 2018 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. The main idea is that by modeling each possession as a Marko

1 - Ryan Davis, Adjusted Plus-Minus and Friends

Jun 28th, 2019 1h 6m

A discussion with Twitter friend Ryan Davis (@rd11490) of a seminal paper in the field of NBA analytics, "Improved NBA Adjusted +/- Using Regularization and Out-of-Sample Testing." Afterwards, we share ideas on ways to further improve RAPM.(00