Bound by June: clutch factor, abortion judges, and black voting patterns
In a somewhat unusual fashion, Dick Bush ’18 took a break from the computer and headed to the basketball court for his Operations Research and Financial Engineering senior thesis, setting out to quantify what National Baseball Association announcers refer to as a player’s “clutch performance.” Clutch is the ability of players to perform well in the final — and often game-deciding — minutes of the game. This is ever-important in the NBA, as 35 percent of games are within five points in the last three minutes. Announcers seem to be incessantly talking about the clutch performance of legendary players, but Bush noted that this is completely based on their individual memory of amazing buzzer beaters rather than an objective measure. He parsed the play-by-play reports from 15 years’ worth of games to create a database which, combined with an algorithm that he made, measures what he calls “clutch factor.” Look out for this amazing new measure on the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network stat pages!