Stats!

My two favorite aspects of sports are the business of sports and the incredible amount of stats in sports. Over at Stdev.net they have created graphs of games based play-by-play data at ESPN.com. Really incredible stuff. You can enter a player's name to see the points.

Graphing the course of a game is awesome. Two things Matt plans on adding to his graph: "... it would be interesting to overlay other statistics on top of the game-o-graphs. For instance, I could plot a moving average of field goal percentage on a second axis. if the two curves have a similar shape, or are moving in the same direction for a while, then you could tell the lead was increasing or decreasing because the team was starting to make or miss their shots."

"I'd also like to test a hypothesis that many announcers state as fact. If a player is shooting poorly, and then they get a dunk or a layup, announcers will say the dunk or layup will 'get them going,' as if to say the dunk or layup somehow makes shooting jump shots easier. If this is true, then field goal percentage for shots taken after a layup should be higher then the field goal percent of shots not taken after a dunk or layup"