Every basketball player takes and makes a unique spatial array of shots. In recent years, technology to measure the coordinates of these constellations has made analysis of them possible, and the possibility exists for distinguishing between different shooters at a level of spatial detail finer...

Yearly, the top National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), Division I, men’s basketball teams compete for the national championship, in what is commonly referred to as “March Madness.” Teams are eligible for the tournament when they either win their conference tournament or are...

This paper analyzes a unique data set consisting of all penalty calls in the National Hockey League between the 1995–1996 and 2001–2002 seasons. The primary finding is the prevalence of “reverse calls:” if previous penalties have been on one team, then the next penalty is more likely to...

Using NHL data for the 1997–1998 through 2011–2012 seasons, we examine the effect of age on scoring performance and plus-minus for NHL skaters (non-goalies) and on save percentage for goaltenders. We emphasize fixed-effects regression methods that estimate a representative age-performance...

Conference affiliation is an important consideration for institutions of higher learning, both athletically and academically. Traditionally, conference affiliation in the NCAA has been determined based largely on geography. However, recent events beg the question of what would be the result if...

The NHL has realigned its conferences and divisions, and starting with the 2013–2014 season the Eastern Conference features 16 teams and the Western Conference features 14. Yet because there are eight playoff spots available in both conferences, teams in the West have a 57% probability of...

In this paper we consider the volleyball under the assumption that the probability of winning a single rally is independent of the other rallies and constant during the game. Fixing two parameters which indicate the probabilities of winning a rally for the serving team, we derive the exact...

Modeling and prediction of ice hockey match results are not as widely examined areas as modeling and prediction of association football match results. It is assumed that match results in football and ice hockey can be modeled by the bivariate Poisson distribution or by some modification of this...

In 2012, 3 out of 10 singles players in the top 100 on the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) World Tour were 30 years old or older – nearly a four-fold increase over 20 years ago, suggesting that the “old at 30” view in men’s tennis may be an old reality. In this paper, I...