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Showing posts from April, 2018

What makes a good NBA player? (part 1)

Hi again! Today I will explore what physical attributes contribute to a successful NBA player. When we watch basketball, we sometimes hear the announcers and analysts talk about stats like wingspan, height, and hand size. How do these attributes contribute to a good player? Are there any that are particularly important? For this part one, I have scraped data from stats.nba.com to look at the distribution of physical attributes from the 2010-2017 NBA combine. To use my simple data scraper, check out my github: https://github.com/dzchen314, or email me for a tutorial (scraping data from stats.nba.com can be pretty tricky). First, I distill the data on these pages (https://stats.nba.com/draft/combine-anthro/#!?SeasonYear=2010-11) to the relevant features, such as by calculating a hand area feature in place of hand length and hand width (units are Imperial, pounds, inches, and inches^2). Now let's plot a notable correlation: Wingspan vs. height: both given in i...