12  Caleb Ng

Author

4th Year
Computer Science
Men’s Basketball (MBB)

This is my first year joining the MBB IST and overall had a great experience. I joined because of my passion for sports, especially basketball, and my desire to leverage my background in software engineering and emerging passion for data science to help the team. I got the opportunity to work on many interesting projects and look forward to the new projects we have in the pipeline for next season!

Projects

PlayerToPro

The first project I worked on was a dashboard to see how our players compare with previous U SPORTS players who have gone on to play professional. It involved getting U SPORTS career and box score data from Martin Timmerman’s U Sports Hoops website and professional career data from RealGM. I utilized the L2 norm difference to filter similar players for each of our players and trained a CatBoost algorithm on pro players’ (who formerly played U SPORTS) stats and the tier of team they played professional in and used it to generate predictions for our players. A next step would be to incorporate more types of data into the dataset the model is trained on such as tracking data or shot data.

Athlete Monitoring

Another project I worked on was a radar plot to compare our players’ most recent wellness data (mood, stress, fatigue, soreness, general health) at a certain point in the season with their baseline measurements taken prior to the start of the regular season to determine if any changes compared to their baseline were statistically significant. Our MBB sports science student would then write a report using this data and send it to Coach Troy every Friday before our weekend games.

Shot and Possession Tracker

One of the tasks Coach Troy did manually was watch back the film and tag information about each shot (who shot, assisted, provided the hockey assist, number of paint touches, shot quality) and possession in a CSV/Excel sheet. I developed a web application whose goal was to streamline this process. Instead of the Excel/CSV, Troy and any additional managers who were responsible for this task could use a simpler interface and save the data to our persistent Azure SQL Databases.

KIN472 Athlete Nutrition Application

We designed and created a minimum viable product of a mobile Athlete Nutrition Application, since we realized from the literature and in conversations with other support staff, our athletes may not be the most educated when it comes to managing their nutritional intake. The point of this project was to examine this problem and pitch a solution, which came in the form of our app. It’s goal was to educate athletes and provide them with the ability to track calorie and macronutrient intake so they could perform well.

Lineup Points Lost (LPL) and Player LPL Contribution (PLC) Report

The final project I worked on (I’m still iterating through it) was taking the spatially allocative efficiency metrics introduced by this paper Measuring spatial allocative efficiency in basketball and implementing it for our team this past year. LPL is a metric that looks at how many points a lineup has lost due to suboptimal shot distribution in a spatial zone on the court (higher LPL is bad). PLC is the metric that measures a player’s contribution to LPL. For our purposes, we used 16 zones and the play by play data and shot data were obtaind via Synergy. I completed and wrote the report for the first iteration of this project which was just implementing it for our team but there are a couple areas of the metric that I still want to investigate and improve on.

Reflections

  • Overall, it was a great experience working with Fauzan, Pierre, Rithika, David, Troy and the rest of the IST. I learned a lot and am thankful for the wisdom and guidance everyone provided. There are big things in store for IST and am excited to be apart of it moving forward. I’m also excited for the projects we are working on and that we will be working on in the future for Troy and the MBB team.

  • Some areas I want to improve on:

    • I want to think more deeply about how to solve a problem and be a better communicator with Troy and the rest of the IST about any solutions I have or how I would approach the problem.

    • I want to keep learning about good software design decisions that I can apply as we improve our applications and infrasturcture. As an analyst, I want to focus on extracting the most important pieces of information that can help the team from my work and not just focus on implementing it.

    • Read more and get more domain knowledge in software engineering and data science.

    • Take on a more leadership role in the IST and help MBB return to the playoffs.