Rocket League: esports (2022)
By Katie Lee, Hugo Leo, Linda Wang

Rocket League is an online game where players control cars in a soccer field with the aim of scoring as many goals as possible within 5 minutes. In this work, existing sports analytics methodology developed for soccer are applied onto Rocket League in order to gain better insights into player skill. The dataset includes instantaneous snapshots of 2 versus 2 player Rocket League games that includes location data of all 4 players, car features, ball position, and whether or not a particular shot resulted in a goal.

Hot Hand Fallacy, Fallacy, Fallacy (2021)
By Kevin Babitz

Common across many domains, and especially prevalent in basketball, the ‘hot hand’ suggests that a person who has experienced a recent period of success has a greater likelihood of future success. In this work, we extend the hot hand literature in three ways: by applying more robust hypothesis testing to the resulting p-values to the Cornell dataset, by demonstrating the effectiveness of a new formula to approximate the bias term in the literature, and by applying the hot hand analysis framework to PGA putting data from the 2019 season. 

Quantifying NBA play style drift using Finite Mixture Multinomial model (2021)
By Andrew Castle, Grant Cho, David Fan

The NBA game has been changing; play style shift, through ‘positionless’ basketball, has been associated with more three-point attempts and fewer inefficient mid-range shots. This study poses new questions to determine if the shift to a three-pointer driven league can be attributed to both the transition of all-around players into long-range shooters as well as rookies coming into the league who are already inclined to shoot more three-pointers. 

Predicting Winners in Cricket: introducing sports analytics to one of the world’s most-watched sports (2021)
By Amy Liu, Sardar Cheema 

The rise in sports analytics has focused on popular American games such as baseball and basketball, as well as soccer. While cricket is one of the most popular sports on a global level, there has been limited application of sport analytics reported in the literature.  In this work, established sports analytics methods are applied to cricket; two cricket models are created, a Pythagorean win rate, and an Elo rating system.