In Search of Jail Blazers’ Years The Team, The Results and The String of Controversialities and Obscenities
Portland Trail Blazers undergone an impressive transformation at the end of the 90s. The club recruited a number of young, talented basketball players, who loved their games and wanted to enjoy the flare and excitement. which the celebrity status entailed. The record was impressive; the lads won in average 55 games out of 82 in the regular season. In season 1998-1999, Portland was the champion of the Pacific division. One of the most expensive teams, Los Angeles Lakers could only claim the second position in the same division. However, their off-court behaviour attracted more media attention, than their on-court success. In order to ameliorate the team's reputation and to stop the decline of the number of paying spectators of the home games, the club made a number of bold decisions between season 2003 - 2004, and season 2005 - 2006. At the end, the Portland could only win 21 games in the regular season. In this project, the players' skill and the strength of the core squads were analysed with a number of computational data mining and statistical methodologies. The intention was to learn which mistakes the club made, when attempting to replace the trouble maker bad boys with a group of new players. The obtained results from the cluster analysis proved that the top offensive players could perform well, if and only if the defensive players possessed the skills, which the offensive players lacked, were willing to the share the ball for the benefit of the team. Furthermore, as a team, the players could play well together, if there was a real sense of camaraderie both on and off the court.
keywords: regularised skill plus minus; skill assessment dimension reduction; multivariate gradient boost classification; team wise skill assessment with K-Means clustering method; Sport analytics
- This project was part of Sport Analytics (753A01) course at Linköping University during VT2 2021.
- Julia Lindohf
- Dimitra Muni
Data courtesy of Sports Reference LLC under creative commons licence, Basketball-Reference.com - Basketball Statistics and History. https://www.basketball-reference.com/.