Chance News 115

September 1, 2018 to ...

Some basketball forsooths

UNC’s generous 3-point defense is a cost of its championship style
by Quintin Schwab, Tar Heel Blog, 4 September 2018

Reports that "Carolina allowed opponents to make 357 of 940 attempts from deep for a 38.0% mark, all of which were the worst figures of any ACC team in at least the last nine years (122 individual team seasons)."

Here are three dubious statistical arguments from the post:

• "The stat is understood in the analytics world as one of the more “fluky” sports data points — Ken Pomeroy famously declared that defending a three-point shot doesn’t matter so much as limiting attempts, and with a shot that goes in, on average, about 35% of the time, there’s a ton of variability just by the low hit percentage of the endeavor."
• Here is a list of ACC teams according to average number of successful 3-point shots allowed/number of attempts

1. Duke: 5.1/16.3 (331 games);

2. Virginia: 5.8/18.0 (305 games);

3. Clemson: 6.0/18.0 (294 games);

4. Louisville: 6.1/19.2 (137 games);

5. North Carolina State: 6.2/18.7 (309 games);

6. Maryland: 6.3/19.2 (168 games);

7. Georgia Tech: 6.3/18.8 (298 games);

8. Miami: 6.4/19.1 (309 games);

9. Pittsburgh: 6.6/19.3 (168 games);

10. Boston College: 6.7/18.8 (292 games);

11. Florida State: 6.9/20.4 (308 games);

12. Wake Forest: 6.9/19.9 (285 games);

13. Virginia Tech: 7.0/21.2 (298 games);

14. Notre Dame: 7.1/20.1 (178 games);

15. Syracuse: 7.4/22.8 (173 games);

16. North Carolina: 7.5/22.0 (337 games).

The blog says, "When the analysis is on a per-game basis, it really highlights how close most of the teams are. In general, an ACC team gives up between six and seven 3-point makes out of about 19 tries per contest. The outliers, or at least the poles, to avoid claiming statistical significance, are, obviously, Duke and North Carolina."

New data search tool

Eric Reyes sent this link to the Isolated Statisticians e-mail list:

Google unveils search engine for open data

by Davide Castelvecchi, Nature News, 5 September 2018