The NBA's Most Valuable Player award is given to the player deemed most valuable for a given year. However, determining what makes a player the "most valuable" is a topic of debate. Is it the highest scoring player, the best player on the best team, or a combination of other factors?
My goal on this project was to use mathematical and machine learning concepts to predict the MVP for a given season by taking into account various factors such as a player's scoring and defensive statistics, their team's winning record, and the number of games they played in a season.
The first step in my process was to gather a large dataset of player statistics, which I achieved through web scraping data from basketball-reference.com using a Python library called BeautifulSoup.
Once I had collected the data, I used various other libraries such as Pandas and NumPy to clean and organize the data into a format that could be easily analyzed. I then used statistics and machine learning concepts to create a model that could predict the MVP based on the data.
One of the key challenges I faced while working on this project was determining which statistics were the most relevant in predicting the MVP. I experimented with different statistics, including traditional stats like points per game and rebounds per game, but found that they were only part of the story. I also found that team performance, specifically their win-loss record, played a significant role in determining the MVP.
After fine-tuning my model, I tested it against past MVP winners and found that it was able to accurately predict the MVP for over 67% of the years and 100% the past 11 years. I was satisfied with the results, and it was a valuable experience to see how statistics and machine learning can be used to analyze and make predictions about sports.
Overall, this project allowed me to combine my interest in programming and basketball to create a tool that could predict the MVP. It was a great learning experience and I am interested in exploring the intersection of sports and data science in the future..
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NBA MVP Predictor
Choose a year between 1973-2023 to see how my program fared on predicting the MVP. If you would like to track the current NBA MVP predictions, choose 2023.
