Automatic Identification and Analysis of Basketball Plays: NBA On-Ball Screens
Andrew Yu, Sun Sunnie Chung · 2019
In this study, we present methodologies to process big data in complex multimedia forms for sports analytics. Sports analytics is the management and analysis of data collected from sports games to quantify past results and predict future outcomes. In basketball, the on-ball screen is a dynamic offensive strategy that involves the movement of multiple players and the ball to create an effective shot attempt. It is a fundamental play employed by all teams in the National Basketball Association (NBA), the highest level of competition for basketball. The analysis of a basketball team and its strategies must first include the identification of such plays. With the presence of sophisticated data collection and analysis tools, this paper proposes methodologies to extract, transform, and analyze player motion-tracking data in NBA games to automatically identify the presence of on-ball screens, with 90% sensitivity, an 8% improvement on existing literature.