A physics theory that’s proven useful to predict the crowd behavior of molecules and fruit flies also seems to work in a very different context—a basketball court.
A model based on density functional theory can suggest the best positioning for each player on the basketball court in a given scenario if they want to raise their probability of either scoring or defending successfully.
Boris Barron, a doctoral student in physics working with Tomás Arias, professor in the Department of Physics, in the College of Arts and Sciences, presented his work on March 9 at the American Physical Society conference in Las Vegas.
Barron got the idea for his project from Nathan Sitaraman, who consults with an NBA team to help them improve their play through data analysis. Sitaraman was able to secure highly detailed data of player positions from this season’s NBA games, which Barron then used to develop his model.
Using the results, Barron is able to:
“We can see precisely where a player should be to help their team, and those few feet can result in as much as a 3% difference (in success),” he said.
2023-03-19 17:00:03
Original from phys.org