$ Money Ball $

Based on Continuous Probability Distribution

How does continuous probability help a manager of a basket ball team???

Background A manager of a basketball team in the NBA league wants to recruit new players into his team. He decides to scout for talent recommended to him by his support coaching staff, from the league. Data Available The data containing the heights of the players Statistical information about the average number of points scored per game Both historical data

Recommended Solution Use continuous probability distributions to arrive at the characteristics of the players Normal distribution for coming up with the desired height required in the players Exponential distribution for checking the competitiveness

The data and calculations for finding out the result

The data available are:

Heights of 324 players from the league Mean number of points scored per game in that league = 200.89

The automated sheet is placed here using which the manager can get to know his desired results just by entering the upper and lower limits Ref: http://jamerchant.wordpress. com/2008/09/25/the-dataheight-and-weight-in-the-nba/

To find the players having desired height

In order to find out the players having the desired height the manager needs to know within which range of the heights he wants his players to be in The range can be located anywhere in the graph shown here- one limit on either end or both the limits on the same end

90 Number 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

18.48

9.24

200.38

9.24

18.48

Height

As per the above illustration the manager wants his players to fall within one SD on either side of the mean. The result is 81.5%(obtained from the worksheet) and his target group is among these 81.5%

To find if the league is competitive enough

1 0.9 0.8

In order to find out the probability of range of points scored in a given time interval in the game we make use of exponential distribution

0.7
0.6 0.5 0.4 0.3 0.2 0.1 0

50

As per the above illustration the manager wants to know the probability that a point is scored between 0th and 50th min which from the sheet we get as 63.04%

Questions