Critical Reviews of NBA Official Data based on Sport Analytics

Purpose: This study was to identify and to recognize the critical moment of NBA official data using sport analytics techniques. Previous studies have already had the research area on the basketball that the sport science was to be applied into enhancing of performance in the practice. The official data was recently considered in many researchers that the official data has been gathered by scientific methods such as advanced technologies. Current trend of performance analysis of sport intends to extent the data range that the official data could be gathered from the official website and it would be a massive dataset. Method: The sport analytics techniques using big data analysis were utilized that the NBA official data from 2015-2016 to 2020-2021 seasons contained more than 3,040,000 events. The Python scripts to gather the NBA official data were utilized and the gathered data as csv format. All analysis of data was executed within R studio with R programming that the changes of numbers of events between seasons and successful rate of each events were compared in this study. Statistically, the frequency analysis was used for the determination of data. Results: This study was to recognize the critical moment among the NBA official data that there were two find-ings mainly. First of all, frequencies of events on 2-pt jump shots have been decreasing and frequencies of events on 3-pt jump shots have been increasing between season. Particularly, the short-distance shots such as 2-pt tip-in, 2-pt layup, 2-pt jump shots were more presented in each season than the long-distance shots. Secondly, the successful rate of shots and outcomes between season have not been differently presented. Conclusion: Consequently, this study has found the displacement of critical changes within the official NBA data that it could indicate the originality of basketball match rather than characteristics of playing. It is also important that the playing trend would be differently observed when the skill or players’ style was able to be consid-ered. Further research is also required that the critical point of recording change on the sequencies of time line would need to be concerned.