Modeling offensive player movement in professional basketball
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 2013 arrival of SportVU player tracking data in all NBA arenas introduced an overwhelming amount of on-court information - information which the league is still learning how to maximize for insights into player performance and basketball strategy. Knowing where the ball and every player on the court are at all times throughout the course of the game produces almost endless possibilities, and it can be difficult figuring out where to begin. This article serves as a step-by-step guide for how to turn a data feed of one million rows of SportVU data from one NBA game into visualizable components you can use to model any player's movement. We detail some utility functions that are helpful for manipulating SportVU data before applying it to the task of visualizing player offensive movement. We conclude with visualizations of the resulting output for one NBA game, as well as what the results look like aggregated across an entire season for three NBA stars with very different offensive tendencies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".