ABSTRACT
Basic Methods for the analysis of sports data typically consist of indexes and charts. Among the countless examples of such analytics, this chapter limits to cite some hugely common analytics based on the concepts of possession and pace. The other basic statistics the chapter will be dealing with are tools of descriptive statistics applied to basketball data. The tools are: bar plots and radial plots built using game variables, percentages or other standardized statistics, scatter plots of two selected variables, bubble plots to represent several features of teams or players in a unique graph, variability and inequality indexes and graphs, and shot charts with the court split into sectors colored according to a selected game variable and annotated with scoring percentage. Shot charts are a useful tool to show shot patterns across the court, in order to analyze the players’ favorite spots on the court to shoot from, also with reference to selected game phases.
