Sports Analytics: Player Evaluations and Game Decisions

Sports is differentiated from most cultural and consumer product categories in the possibility of using data and analytics techniques to improve performance. Sports competitions produce massive amounts of data, and critically, sports contests and seasons have objective measures of success. Given that fans are attracted to winning, this means that sports analytics may be a primary driver of fandom. This chapter discusses sports analytics in the context of player personnel decisions and in-game decision-making.