ESPN Uses Student Research

Soon the two classmates were pulling late nights downloading massive data sets from basketball-reference.com and developing their analysis methods. “Fynn and Morgan did an incredible job learning the survival analytic models and building a dataset that would allow them to answer their questions,” says Addona, himself a big sports fan. “Sporting contexts provide a setting for many of the same sorts of questions one may want to answer in other fields.” 

Fynn’s and Sonnenschein’s research paper, “An Analysis of the Career Length of Professional Basketball Players,” is available online, which may be how ESPN found it. Previous research predicting NBA career length focused on factors such as race, size, and game performance, according to the two researchers. They chose to instead analyze awards won, positions played, and physical variables such as height. They found that that, statistically speaking, players who are taller, win a greater number of awards, and are more versatile in positions played tend to have longer NBA careers. 

Fynn’s and Sonnenschein’s research has gone from a class project to, at this writing, the top result of a Google search of “NBA survival analysis”—pretty heady stuff for young statisticians.

Sonnenschein, who graduated last December, is a test analyst in healthcare information technology for Cerner Corporation in Kansas City, Missouri. Fynn, set to graduate in May, will join Goldman Sachs Asset Management in New York as an analyst.