Predicting Which Teams Will Make the NBA Playoffs

14 Pages Posted: 21 Apr 2016 Last revised: 18 Dec 2016

See all articles by Ryan Elmore

Ryan Elmore

University of Denver - Daniels College of Business

Date Written: December 17, 2016

Abstract

The National Basketball Association (NBA) is the premier men’s professional basketball league in the world. Thirty teams vie for the sixteen spots in order to compete for the Larry O’Brien NBA Finals Championship Trophy. In this paper, we introduce a logistic regression model that can be used to predict which teams will make the playoffs at any given point in the NBA season. In addition, we discuss potential applications of this ranking scheme that can be used by an NBA front office, as well as “arm-chair” GMs playing fantasy sports. More importantly, we move beyond the rankings that are commonly seen on the popular websites by providing a measure of uncertainty associated with our predictions. Finally, we introduce an Rpackage (ballr) that can be used to access data from basketball-reference.com.

Keywords: basketball analytics, logistic regression

Suggested Citation

Elmore, Ryan, Predicting Which Teams Will Make the NBA Playoffs (December 17, 2016). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2764482 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2764482

Ryan Elmore (Contact Author)

University of Denver - Daniels College of Business ( email )

2101 S. University Blvd.
Denver, CO 80208
United States

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