Modeling and Computing Probabilities of NBA Players Shooting Averages: Empirical and Theoretic Distributions

For our statistic analysis we chose the sports area, namely basketball and NBA. NBA is the most popular basketball association and league in the world. It includes 29 teams - 27 U.S.A. teams and 2 Canadian ones. Besides observing each team\u27s and players\u27 performance there are also many commercial activities related to the NBA games like advertising, selling tickets, selling basketball gears & accessories which serve as a broad field for statistic analysis. Our objective was to collect raw data of 150 randomly chosen NBA players quantitatively, qualitatively and graphically analyze the data and make conclusions which could be used in decision-making process of the NBA association, each coach or for other business related activities. There are many categories NBA players\u27 statistics are collected on. We chose the shooting percentage of a player which means the percentage proportion of made shots over total shots that a player takes in games. In the first part of the project we are analyzing the gathered data to obtain descriptive statistics of our sample and histograms help us to understand the distribution of the data. In the next step we are providing the probabilities of shooting percentages falling into determined intervals. One of the challenges of the project was to hypothesize 3 possible continuous probability distribution functions which we eventually compare to our empirical histogram. In the last part of the project we discuss our observations and make conclusions