The 2019 NBA Draft is nearly here! In part 1 on looking at the journey from college to the pros through data, we laid a lot of groundwork, namely how we:

• Used Sports Reference’s college basketball site and a useful Python API to get nine seasons of NCAA player and team game and season data into BigQuery
• Created advanced college basketball player stats on the game and season level using views in BigQuery
• Adjusted those ratings for schedule to get a better assessment of player performance using AI Platform Jupyter Notebooks
• Created an interactive Data Studio dashboard that allows examination…

We know, we know. School is basically out for the summer. But for NCAA basketball fans, there’s perhaps one more milestone coming up to cap off this season: the 2019 NBA Draft on Thursday!

Key draft picks have powered championship teams from the 1950s to today, so attempts to project how college prospects will perform in the NBA have been vital to draft-related decision-making for nearly as long. But using data to inform these projections and influence NBA Draft decisions has been a much more recent trend. …

“Survive and Advance.” It’s a motto that comes up almost every March nowadays, with its origin attributed to a Jim Valvano quote during the 1983 NC State Wolfpack’s miracle run to the championship. Given the single-elimination nature of the NCAA Tournament, and the fact that many of these games come down to a couple possessions at the end, it’s also an appropriate quote.

As Virginia, Michigan State, Texas Tech, and Auburn get set to take the court in the Final Four in Minneapolis, each team has had to survive some very close games and tense moments to make it this…

In Part 1 of our two-part post on measuring how clutch NCAA men’s basketball teams are, we developed a “Clutchness” metric using our NCAA play-by-play data in BigQuery and Colab. We saw that LSU and Duke, who both take the court in the Sweet 16 on Friday, were ranked in the top three of our Clutchness ratings based on games through March 26.

To refresh your memory (see Part 1 for much more detail), we look at the situation with five minutes left in regulation — score difference, site, and opponent — in each game, use a model to determine…

Clutchness. From seemingly the beginning of athletic competition, it’s been one of the hottest topics in sports. Who comes through in crunch time? Who comes up short when the game is on the line? Do “clutch” reputations match results?

For example, if you watched the scintillating Duke-UCF finish in the Round of 32 last weekend, you’d be tempted to say you saw clutchness on display. Zion Williamson was “unreal clutch” on his game-saving layup with 14 seconds left, according to some.

Sure, except that he missed the potential tying free throw…But then that set up RJ Barrett for his own…

As a college basketball fan, if you miss watching a particular game involving your favorite team, the main thing you’ll look for afterward is the final score — who won and by how much? But if you actually watch enough games from start to finish, you know the final score does not always tell the whole story.

Let’s take a couple Villanova games from this season as examples:

• January 5 win at Providence, 65–59
• February 17 loss at St. John’s, 71–65

A 6-point win where they played well enough to win and a 6-point loss where they must’ve played worse…

Co-Author: Elissa Lerner

While we wait to see how the NET nets out for the first time this Selection Sunday, one thing is certain: basketball heads will be chattering away about the difficulty of program schedules. You might have heard that it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. But that’s not entirely true — it also matters whom you play.

Intuitively, this makes sense: playing well against a strong team seems like it should matter more than playing well against a weak team. But when you hear about teams playing amazing defense, what does…