Analyzing Kobe Bryant's
Regular Season Career Trajectory
November 2018
Introduction
Kobe Bryant played 20 seasons for the Los Angeles Lakers and attempted over 30,000 field goals. Kaggle published a raw dataset containing shot profiles for every single attempt, but a sixth of the rows do not indicate whether or not the shot was made or not.
Task: create a model that determines the outcome of a shot attempt based on features such as location, distance from the basket, opponent, etc.
I elected to implement a decision tree classification model, using Python and the scikit-learn library. The algorithm takes into account 11 features: action type, shot type, location, quarter, playoffs, season, distance, area, zone, date, and opponent.
Half-Court Shot Map
Excluding shots attempted from beyond half-court, all misses are characterized by green points and all makes are characterized by purple points. All data points here reflect the 5,000 generated outcomes from the decision tree algorithm in addition to the 25,000 original entries with known outcomes.
Points Per Game (excluding FTs): Predicted VS Actual
In the graph below, the green data points resemble Bryant’s real points per game averages throughout his career (excluding free throws). Similarly, the blue data points resemble his averages with my model’s generated outcomes. Although I did not quantify my model’s accuracy, the green and blue data points show considerable overlap.
The purpose of the purple curve is to display a trendline for Bryant’s career PPG over time.
Additional Exploration
In the five graphs below, the green points paired with the purple trendline correspond to Kobe Bryant. Likewise the black data points/trendline correspond to Michael Jordan, the orange points/trendline correspond to LeBron James, and the red data points/trendline correspond to Dwyane Wade. To account for the fact that not all four players started their careers in the same year, the data points for Jordan, James, and Wade have been shifted to align with Bryant’s career debut in 1997.
Conclusion
In comparison with Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant generally shot the least efficient on overall field goals and two-pointers, while shooting the most three-pointers with the highest three-point efficiency. Lastly, while Bryant’s early scoring averages trailed the other three stars by up to a double-digit difference, his scoring averages from his prime overtake those of James and Wade.
The Bottom Line: Kobe Bryant was a relatively inefficient volume shooter.