Each year Stats Perform’s AI team attends MIT’s Sloan Sports Conference to showcase our latest innovations in sports technology. Our 2017 entry from Panna Felson and Patrick Lucey titled “’BodyShots’: Analysing Shooting Styles in the NBA using 3D Body-Pose Information” developed a novel attribute-based representation of basketball player’s body pose during a three point shot.
Using Pearson’s Chi-squared test to quantify differences in attribute distributions for made and missed shots, we observed statistically significant differences in distributions of attributes describing the style of movement, e.g., walk, run, or hop, in various phases of the shot.
The paper includes a case study on Stephen Curry, where we observed that Curry moves much more than the average player in all phases of his shot and he takes a higher proportion of off-balance shots compared to the average player.
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