Sports

Numbers-driven research on sport, starting with the NBL: leads, streaks, home court, shots and players, from the data behind NBL Tracker.

Basketball is a personal interest of Mark’s. Here the research tests the method on a new set of data.

NBL

Australia's National Basketball League: every game since 1979 and every play since 2015-16.

A ten-point half-time lead still loses one time in eight, shooters do not get hot, and a timeout adds almost nothing to a run.

Home court was worth 4.5 points a game for forty years and is worth about 2 now. The back-to-back is gone, and travel barely matters.

The midrange has halved and every team takes similar shots. What separates them is making shots, and that does not last.

Only 28 of 159 players can be told apart from average. Imports produce more per minute, but two in three leave within a year.