At some point late in the EPL season I could tell when Harry Kane scored more than one goal in a game without having to watch him play. That’s because a couplathree people would Tweet into my timeline a shot1 at me with a link to this. It’s the piece I did for FiveThirtyEight at […]
Statsbomb’s James Yorke put out the following tidbit before this week’s Sunday games1. Leicester opposition all shot conversion rate from season midpoint onwards = 3.4%. Insanely low, can't last forever.— James Yorke (@jair1970) April 10, 2016 Of all the ridiculous stats about Leicester’s season I’ve seen so far this was maybe the ridiculousist. Made even […]
It’s time to kill the penalty kick.I’ve made the case elsewhere that Premier League officials (in particular) are terrible at their jobs1. Certainly there are multiple missed or incorrect calls all over the place during a match, which is understandable as A) many (most?) infractions are judgement calls to begin with and B) referees are […]
One of the better professors I had taught that there are four basic questions you want to ask about any data you look at. The most important (and probably most obvious) is: Is it accurate? A couple of weeks back, after Manchester United’s win at Liverpool, I noticed something on the shot charts that get […]
Fred McGriff is a victim. In fact, along with the Montreal Expos, he’s probably the biggest victim of the 1994 MLB players’ strike. That’s because it’s very possible—probable even—the strike is what’s keeping him from the Hall of Fame. This all rests on one assumption: Fred McGriff was clean. How reasonable is that? His name […]
It might be time to start legitimately asking the above question about Ohio State’s Braxton Miller. Miller left this weekend’s game against Minnesota after his helmet made pretty forceful contact with the playing surface during the course of a tackle. It’s the second time that’s happened in his playing career. Combine that with another incident […]
Darren Rovell is annoying. For a myriad of reasons, I’m sure. For current purposes he’s annoying because, as a sports business reporter, he can’t seem to do basic business or financial calculations (although, maybe his editorial overlords don’t even want him to). He put up a list yesterday of the worst dead money contracts in […]
This started a couple of weeks back when there was a single PL game where three goals were scored from an offside position. One was extraordinarily close, so much so that it’s barely conclusive with a frozen frame of the moment the ball was played. The other two were laughably bad. One was from a […]
These are player shot charts for the Championship and Premier League last season. They should be (mostly) self-explanatory. Link here: https://mbertin.shinyapps.io/shotChartBlue crosshairs are goals; whites are misses. A player’s conversion rate is just his goals divided by the number of total shots. The last number, Naked Shot Probability (NSP), is a metric based on the […]
NOTE: This was originally written for Deadpsin and was going to run before the last Arsenal v. Chelsea game at the end of last season (April 26, 2015). It somehow fell into the Internet equivalent of turnaround and never saw the light of day. Given Mike Dean’s performance at Stamford Bridge this weekend (September 19, […]