Post by hchoops on Sept 29, 2022 10:39:23 GMT -5
Another reason they have led the pack
Exerpreted From The Athletic
It’s a tedious process, a similar exercise that turned Gerszberg into an entrepreneur.
During the 2019-20 season, then-Colgate assistant coach Dave Klatsky tasked Gerszberg with tracking every shot in practice and games and assigning an expected point total based on the quality of it the attempt. Gerszberg had shown up in Klatsky’s office a year earlier, when he had randomly been assigned as freshman roommates with Colgate guard Tucker Richardson and expressed a passion for analytics in sports. Richardson told him to go see Klatsky.
Gerszberg and Klatsky came up with a system where they’d grade the quality of a shot on a 1-to-100 scale. The value was based on the location of the shot, who was taking it, how open it was and whether it was off the catch or the dribble. For instance, a catch-and-shoot 3 from a good shooter might be a 50, which would mean it’s worth 1.5 points. Gerszberg would chart every shot, then Klatsky would go back through the tape and check his work.
“I freaking hated it,” Gerszberg said. “Because I had friends on the team and I wasn’t even watching the game anymore. I was just outputting numbers on this clipboard, like all these data points spinning out of my head. It was so nauseating.”
That Christmas break Gerszberg decided he’d see if he could automate the process, using multiple play-by-play data sets to do the work for him. What his algorithm spit out was nearly identical to what he was tracking by hand. He showed the Colgate coaches his work. “They were totally in shock,” he said.
The rest of that season, Gerszberg continued tracking every shot by hand and cross-checking his automated data. It was always within one point. After the season he learned to program what he was doing on his spreadsheet for every team in college basketball and in the NBA. A business was born.
During the 2020-21 season, 25 teams signed up for ShotQuality in what was basically a proof-of-concept season. Last season, 60 teams paid for the service, along with 500 bettors. ShotQuality spits out a projected score of every game; Gerszberg’s model correctly predicted the over/under in 54 percent of games last season with 15 pushes, and it correctly picked the closing line-adjusted winner 51.4 percent of the time with 30 pushes.
Gerszberg bet on himself by essentially quitting school to run his business. He didn’t enroll in any classes during the first semester of what would have been his senior year and then took only two classes in the spring. He’s now a college dropout, a decision his parents weren’t too pleased with initially. Then this summer Gerszberg received over $3 million in ShotQuality’s first funding round.
“Which is part of the reason my parents are OK with me taking a little bit of a break from school,” he said.
This season he’ll offer a service that will use computer vision to track the players on the floor and extract the same data he’d been tracking from the screen, precisely telling the distance of every shot and how close a defender is to the shooter. Gerszberg hired Neil Johnson from the Washington Wizards to add the computer vision tool to his service. He saw Johnson present at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2020, and Johnson convinced him to focus on college and not the NBA. The NBA, Johnson told him, has Second Spectrum, which uses cameras around the arena to track the movement of every player. ShotTracker provides a similar service for college, but only the Big 12 and Mountain West have the technology installed in their arenas.
Johnson argued to Gerszberg that colleges didn’t have anything to measure process-based data; their hope is to allow coaches to change how they deliver information to their players.
“Using analytics to coach is really good, but I think it’s even more valuable when you have film to pair with it,” Golden said. “In my mind, that’s an easier way to teach guys shot selection than trying to do it without having that film to fall back on.”
Exerpreted From The Athletic
It’s a tedious process, a similar exercise that turned Gerszberg into an entrepreneur.
During the 2019-20 season, then-Colgate assistant coach Dave Klatsky tasked Gerszberg with tracking every shot in practice and games and assigning an expected point total based on the quality of it the attempt. Gerszberg had shown up in Klatsky’s office a year earlier, when he had randomly been assigned as freshman roommates with Colgate guard Tucker Richardson and expressed a passion for analytics in sports. Richardson told him to go see Klatsky.
Gerszberg and Klatsky came up with a system where they’d grade the quality of a shot on a 1-to-100 scale. The value was based on the location of the shot, who was taking it, how open it was and whether it was off the catch or the dribble. For instance, a catch-and-shoot 3 from a good shooter might be a 50, which would mean it’s worth 1.5 points. Gerszberg would chart every shot, then Klatsky would go back through the tape and check his work.
“I freaking hated it,” Gerszberg said. “Because I had friends on the team and I wasn’t even watching the game anymore. I was just outputting numbers on this clipboard, like all these data points spinning out of my head. It was so nauseating.”
That Christmas break Gerszberg decided he’d see if he could automate the process, using multiple play-by-play data sets to do the work for him. What his algorithm spit out was nearly identical to what he was tracking by hand. He showed the Colgate coaches his work. “They were totally in shock,” he said.
The rest of that season, Gerszberg continued tracking every shot by hand and cross-checking his automated data. It was always within one point. After the season he learned to program what he was doing on his spreadsheet for every team in college basketball and in the NBA. A business was born.
During the 2020-21 season, 25 teams signed up for ShotQuality in what was basically a proof-of-concept season. Last season, 60 teams paid for the service, along with 500 bettors. ShotQuality spits out a projected score of every game; Gerszberg’s model correctly predicted the over/under in 54 percent of games last season with 15 pushes, and it correctly picked the closing line-adjusted winner 51.4 percent of the time with 30 pushes.
Gerszberg bet on himself by essentially quitting school to run his business. He didn’t enroll in any classes during the first semester of what would have been his senior year and then took only two classes in the spring. He’s now a college dropout, a decision his parents weren’t too pleased with initially. Then this summer Gerszberg received over $3 million in ShotQuality’s first funding round.
“Which is part of the reason my parents are OK with me taking a little bit of a break from school,” he said.
This season he’ll offer a service that will use computer vision to track the players on the floor and extract the same data he’d been tracking from the screen, precisely telling the distance of every shot and how close a defender is to the shooter. Gerszberg hired Neil Johnson from the Washington Wizards to add the computer vision tool to his service. He saw Johnson present at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2020, and Johnson convinced him to focus on college and not the NBA. The NBA, Johnson told him, has Second Spectrum, which uses cameras around the arena to track the movement of every player. ShotTracker provides a similar service for college, but only the Big 12 and Mountain West have the technology installed in their arenas.
Johnson argued to Gerszberg that colleges didn’t have anything to measure process-based data; their hope is to allow coaches to change how they deliver information to their players.
“Using analytics to coach is really good, but I think it’s even more valuable when you have film to pair with it,” Golden said. “In my mind, that’s an easier way to teach guys shot selection than trying to do it without having that film to fall back on.”