Networks in Basketball
Since the NBA season just tipped off last night, I figured it would be fitting to discuss how basketball could possibly fit into our realm of network analysis discussed in this class. In these articles, basketball games are analyzed through networks, with players posing as nodes, and each pass between them classified as a path. Each position (Point Guard, Shooting Guard, Small Forward, Power Forward, Center) has his own specific node. 
The path the ball takes from the in-bound pass (which starts a possession) to the made basket, is represented by each pass the players make. Professors Fewell and Armbruster sought out a way to map out the ideal basketball game by using results from the 2010 NBA playoffs. They noticed that teams usually go through their point guards, but that the team that eventually won the championship(the Los Angeles Lakers) implemented an offense known as the triangle offense that had the ball in many other people’s hands. The number of people who touched the ball before there was a score was much higher, which meant there was more ball movement. This increase in ball movement was what they concluded led to a more balanced offense, and more efficiency. In traditional offenses, the point guard has much more power in the network than in the triangle offense.
This view of the game, however, does not take defense into account. If you were to take defensive players into account, and give each offensive player a valuation based on their offensive skills and their defender’s defensive skills, then this would become something of a market model where the best payoff would involve the best chance for the offense to score. In order to find the “market-clearing prices”, the coaches and players would have to figure out a way to have the biggest discrepancy between their player’s skill and that player’s defender’s. This would lead to a situation in which the “buyer” would be the offensive player, and his valuation would be based on his ability to score on each defender. This could be how coaches figure out the best matchups. The same can be applied to the opposite end of the ball, where coaches try to figure out defensive schemes in order to stop scores.
Source: http://www.wired.com/2012/12/basketball-network-analysis/