Looking for measures of shot difficulty & defensive behavior

[b-baller23]

Hi everyone,

I'm new in this form and I just started doing some research for my PhD.

For my studies, I would need some proxies which measure shot difficulty and defensive behavior with respect to a certain player. Does anyone happen to know some measures I could make use of? I've been playing basketball for 15+ years but I haven't come across any statistics which would measure these two aspects of the game.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you very much,
b-baller23

[Crow]

Hey. If you wrote a further paragraph or two giving more detail about what you are looking for the chances of getting help would probably increase. I am not sure how to respond right now other than to suggest looking at Synergy and 82 games.com data.

[b-baller23]

Hey Crow,

Thanks a lot for your response. I already looked on basketball-reference.com and 82games.com but I couldn't find any such measures.

Basically, I am trying to measure how a player's shot selection varies in the course of the game due to defensive adjustments that are being made. For example, I'm trying to quantify whether the defense increases its pressure because a player has just hit his last 2-3 shots.

Shot difficulty surely depends on the type of shot and the distance but I'm looking for further measures and ideally also for a statistic which already accounts for these factors. As for defensive pressure, I was thinking that maybe the number of defenders contesting a shot could be useful but that's not something that could easily be measured. Therefore, I'm looking for other kinds of proxies.

Thanks very much for your help!

[Crow]

Thanks for the additional information. I think for degree of contest you might want the data that Toronto apparently is developing from Sportvu video and the play by plat data. http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/906 ... revolution and http://www.grantland.com/blog/the-trian ... askPerhaps you could contact Alex Rucker (an analyst for them and occasional poster here) memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=506 and see if he could get you a small sample of that data for your research use or maybe they could even use your assistance on the topic. Or maybe you could just get a useful conversation about it with him.