The 2024-2025 NBA season is just starting and you have just landed a job as a data scientist for your favorite NBA team. With various changes in play style, officiating, and general strategy things look very different for professional basketball than when the NBA first started. In basketball, there are 5 traditional positions with their traditional roles listed below:
- Point Guard (PG): Known for having the ball a lot, being the shortest players, getting most of the assists, scoring decent points, mostly scoring by shooting
- Shooting Guards (SG): Known for being mid sized players scoring a lot of points, shooting the most 3-point shots, getting a decent balance of assists and rebounds
- Small Forward (SF): Known for being mid sized players with a balance of points, assists, rebounds, and generally excelling on defense. Mostly shooting from mid range
- Power Forward (PF): Known for being larger players scoring some points with a lot of rebounds, and excelling on defense. Mostly shooting from close range.
- Center ( C) : Known for being the largest players on the court and for being the best defenders, getting lots of blocks and rebounds. Hardly ever taking 3 point shots, or really for scoring anywhere but from very close range
However, size, skillsets, and strategy have changed the game, so even though there are 5 players on the court at all time, these traditional roles don’t always fit. In this project, we hope to determine different player “archetypes” which you can think of as types of roles that are not concretely defined. These are very abstract roles, so they are up to you to define from the data. There is no set number of archetypes you must define but they should be decent approximations of the kinds of players who are in the league today. You will use 2023-2024 regular season data as this is the last full season.
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