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Getting NBA Shots in Context: Analysing Basketball Shots with Graph Embeddings Cover

Getting NBA Shots in Context: Analysing Basketball Shots with Graph Embeddings

Open Access
|May 2025

Abstract

Evaluating the quality of shots in basketball is crucial and requires considering the context in which they are taken. We introduce a graph neural network to process a graph based on player and ball tracking data to compute expected shot quality. We evaluate this model against other models focusing on calibration. The messages between spatial and temporal features are separated, and an attention mechanism is implemented, making the graph neural network interpretable. We use the GNNExplainer to further show the importance of node features. To demonstrate possible practical applications, we analyse the embeddings of the graph neural network concerning different situations like the mean of all player predictions or similarity between created shots and compare this to existing methods.

Language: English
Page range: 73 - 93
Published on: May 14, 2025
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 2 issues per year

© 2025 Marc Schmid, Moritz Schöpf, Otto Kolbinger, published by International Association of Computer Science in Sport
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.