Two clusterings to capture basketball players’ shooting tendencies using tracking data: clustering of shooting styles and the shots themselves

Abstract Studies to understand the shooting preferences of basketball players relied exclusively on data on shot location, which did not lead to concrete understandings because they contained no information on how they moved to that location. Therefore, this study tried to cluster the players' shooting tendencies using the tracking data of the players' movements during the game. To do this, we first created hand-crafted shot features that included information on the pre-shot movement. Using those features, the dissimilarity of shooting tendencies between players was computed by considering the shot set of each player as a probability distribution and calculating the Wasserstein distance between them. The clustering based on their dissimilarity resulted in more clusters than in previous studies and allowed for specific shooting styles to be defined. Clustering using Gower distance as a dissimilarity measure for shot features, including a categorical feature, extracted clusters of shots that are useful for understanding players' more detailed shooting tendencies. These results prove that it is not only the shot location but also how the player moved before the shot that is important to capture the player's shooting preferences.