27 citations · 68 across the 7 of their papers we have counts for
5 papers · 1 filter
Stated, Realized, and Optimal Aiming Strategies for the Tennis Serve: Experimental Evidence from Collegiate Athletes
Nathan Sandholtz, Ryan Hanson, Ron Hager +4
We study how a player's execution error affects the optimal location at which to aim a serve in tennis. Aiming near the service-box boundaries makes a serve harder to return but in…
Learning Risk Preferences in Markov Decision Processes: an Application to the Fourth Down Decision in the National Football League
Nathan Sandholtz, Lucas Wu, Martin Puterman +1
For decades, National Football League (NFL) coaches' observed fourth down decisions have been largely inconsistent with prescriptions based on statistical models. In this paper, we…
Miss It Like Messi: Extracting Value from Off-Target Shots in Soccer
Ethan Baron, Nathan Sandholtz, Devin Pleuler +1
Measuring soccer shooting skill is a challenging analytics problem due to the scarcity and highly contextual nature of scoring events. The introduction of more advanced data surrou…
Measuring Spatial Allocative Efficiency in Basketball
Nathan Sandholtz, Jacob Mortensen, Luke Bornn
Every shot in basketball has an opportunity cost; one player's shot eliminates all potential opportunities from their teammates for that play. For this reason, player-shot efficien…
Markov Decision Processes with Dynamic Transition Probabilities: An Analysis of Shooting Strategies in Basketball
Nathan Sandholtz, Luke Bornn
In this paper we model basketball plays as episodes from team-specific non-stationary Markov decision processes (MDPs) with shot clock dependent transition probabilities. Bayesian…