Before I left for Boston I mentioned a post by Climbing the Ladder that published plus/minus data for the previous MLS season. It's a good start, but some of the results just didn't pass the laugh test for me. (I'll explain why much later today.) While I was at the conference, I talked with Joe […]
[This is the third post in a multi-part review of the 2010 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.]For the first time in the brief history of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the organizers put together a session that allowed the presentation of research papers. The papers were split into two categories: those published by academic […]
[This is the second part of my review of the 2010 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.]In the afternoon, I attended the main forum of the day, which was provocatively titled, "What Geeks Don't Get: The Limits of Moneyball". Like the baseball, basketball, and emerging analytics sessions, this one was also standing room only. That it […]
Hello, and greetings from 34,000 feet! I decided to get started on my review of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. This is going to be the first of about three or four parts that touch on different sessions during the event. I took pictures on Saturday but the uploading software that I use is on […]
Today was the day of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, and I spent all day at the conference interacting with participants from the world of sport, finance, and other technical fields. It was a very enjoyable conference and I am in the middle of writing a summary of what went on. I return to Arizona […]
Today was quite an eventful travel day. No, not because of the flight. The two plane rides I had were very uneventful, the best kind, actually. The real issue was my mobile phone. I have had a Blackberry Curve for a little over two years, and the rollerball has acted up on several occasions to […]
Blogger "scaryice" of Climbing the Ladder has compiled plus/minus ratings for the 2009 MLS season, with raw and adjusted data that give some results that might be surprising to people. I've thought of plus/minus ratings at various times in the past, but I'm not so sure that a plus/minus rating translates well to soccer. I […]
This post will be kept at the top of the page for the week. More recent posts are below.If you still haven't registered for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, it's too late. The conference has officially sold out with over 800 1000 attendees. The previous two meetings were at the MIT campus with a […]
I completed my write-up of my revised derivations of the soccer Pythagorean formula. It fixes the problems that I had with overpredicting points and calculating win and draw probabilities that exceeded unity. Maybe I should come up with a better name, because it no longer looks like the Pythagorean equation.Here's the document link:PythagDerivationVersion2p0.pdf [240kb]I hope […]
Back in November 2009 there was a discussion on the Sounders At Heart website on soccer statistics, and this site had been cited, among others. I had followed some of the thread, and it brought me back to something I probably mentioned briefly: what is a good statistic in soccer?Perhaps we can answer the question […]
