Find basketball players with similar shot charts
A live version of this flask app can be seen at: https://similar-shooter.herokuapp.com/. Note, I am not paying anything to host this, so it could take forever to run...
Here are some static examples, though.
Who is most similar to DeAndre Jordan? Top shot-chart match: Rody Gobert
Who is most similar to Buddy Hield? Top shot-chart match: Tim Hardaway
I played around with a lot of different algorithms to define what makes shot charts similar. It's an interesting question: what does it mean for two shot charts to be similar?
I made the following assumptions:
- If two shot charts are the exact same, but with different densities, they are still very similar. Players with different usage rates shouldn't be penalized as being different.
- The most important features are distance from the hoop, and 2PT vs 3PT shots. I largely disregard things like which side of the court players shoot from.
Using these assumptions, I compare the Kullback-Leibler divergence of each players shot distributions. Players with low KL divergence have high similarity.
Shot data and shot charts are scrapped seperately (design flaw). These data were scraped March 7 2017, so they contain data from the 2017 season up until this data.
To get up-to-date data, rerun scraper/scraper.py and shotchart/shotchart.py.
To get historic data, change global parameter YEAR before scraping.