"Is Basketball Scoring Just a Random Walk?"

Note: *Coffee will be served at 3pm; Talk begins at 3:30pm
Speaker: Sid Redner, Santa Fe Institute

When: December 5, 2017 (Tue), 03:30PM to 04:30PM (add to my calendar)
Location: SCI 109
View the poster for this event.

This event is part of the Physics Department Colloquia Series.

Watching basketball is nearly the same as watching repeating coin tossings! By analyzing recently available data from recent NBA basketball seasons, basketball scoring during a game is well described by a continuous-time anti-persistent random walk, with essentially no temporal correlations between successive scoring events. We show how to calibrate this model to account for many statistical season-long metrics of NBA basketball. As further fillustrations of this random-walk picture, we show that the distribution of times when the last lead change occurs and the distribution of times when the score difference is maximal are both given by the celebrated arcsine law--—a beautiful and surprising property of random walks. We also use the random-walk picture to construct the criterion for when a lead of a specified size is "safe" as a function of the time remaining in the game. The obvious application to game-time betting is left as an exercise for the interested.