Mark E. Glickman, JQAS Editor-in-Chief; James Albert, JQAS Past Editor-in-Chief

The September 2014 issue (volume 10, issue 3) of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports (JQAS) features five articles covering topics in hockey, basketball, and American football. All make for interesting reading and demonstrate innovations in statistical work that have become a hallmark of manuscripts published in JQAS.

The two articles on hockey, “Modeling and Prediction of Ice Hockey Match Results” by Patrice Marek, Blanka Šedivá, and Tomáš Ťoupal, and “How the West Will Be Won: Using Monte Carlo Simulations to Estimate the Effects of NHL Realignment” by Stephen Pettigrew, address different aspects of hockey performance.

In Marek et al., the authors examine and develop models for hockey game outcomes that have connections to methods applied in an association football context. They specifically model hockey game scores as following bivariate Poisson distributions that acknowledge increased probabilities of ties. Their approach is demonstrated on the results of hockey games played in Extraliga, the highest-level ice hockey league in the Czech Republic.

The manuscript by Pettigrew, in contrast, focuses on the implications of a decision by the National Hockey League (NHL) to create imbalance in the number of teams eligible to make the playoffs in the Eastern and Western conferences. Through a careful simulation analysis, Pettigrew estimates that teams in the Eastern conference will, on average, need to win 1–2 more games in the regular season to make the playoffs than teams in the Western conference. The paper questions the decision by the NHL to adopt this new set of rules for playoff selection.

The articles “Creating Space to Shoot: Quantifying Spatial Relative Field Goal Efficiency in Basketball” by Ashton Shortridge, Kirk Goldsberry, and Matthew Adams and “Life on the Bubble: Who’s In and Who’s Out of March Madness?” by Scotland Leman, Leanna House, John Szarka, and Hayley Nelson tackle two issues in basketball. In Shortridge et al., the authors compiled detailed locations of shot selections among all NBA players over the 2011–2012 season and used empirical Bayes models to spatially smooth shot success probabilities. The approach is used to construct measures of shooting effectiveness for individual players that can be compared to league averages, controlling for location on the court.

Leman et al. focus on determinants of men’s college basketball teams entering the NCAA tournament. Noting that the subjective aspects of the tournament selection process particularly affects entry for the teams on the borderline between acceptance and denial, the manuscript examines metrics associated for selection for these borderline teams. The manuscript also suggests guidelines for constructing a team’s schedule based on the metrics most associated with tournament selection.

Finally, “Choosing the Most Popular NFL Games in a Local TV Market” by Scott Grimshaw and Scott Burwell examines predictors of higher TV audience for NFL games in a market without a local team. The analysis focused on NFL games shown in the Salt Lake City market over the previous 10 years. This work was motivated by the authors’ advising the local broadcast station on week-to-week game selection.

These articles are available on a subscription basis from the JQAS website. Prospective authors also can find the journal’s aims, scope, and manuscript submission instructions there.