A numbers game

To most observers, a blistering, bruising basketball game is a contest of speed and athleticism. But to Dario Zarrabian and Nate Hollenberg, the sport is very much a numbers game. The two undergraduates at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have teamed up with USA Basketball on a series of projects to incorporate data science techniques into Team USA's strategies. After hearing about the project through the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective , the two basketball buffs jumped at the chance to combine their passions and academic interests. They provided recommendations to Kirk Goldsberry, analyst for Team USA Basketball and Vice President of Strategic Research for the San Antonio Spurs (and a former visiting scholar in the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis ), on creating a structured database that tracks performance statistics of players among many different leagues. From there, they dove deeper and used statistics to help the team develop a strategy for the Nike Hoops Summit, a high-profile game that pits the best U.S. high school players against top international opponents. Using advanced math, they analyzed box score data from past Nike Hoops games.