STAMP: A shot-type-aware areal multilevel Poisson model for league-wide comparison of basketball shot charts
Abstract
Shooting location is a core indicator of offensive style in invasion sports. Existing basketball shot-chart analyses often use spatial information for descriptive visualization, location-based efficiency modeling, or clustering players into shooting archetypes, yet few studies provide a unified framework for fair comparison of shot-type-specific tendencies. We propose the shot-type-aware areal multilevel Poisson (STAMP) model, which jointly models team-level field-goal attempts across predefined court regions, seasons, and shot types using a Poisson likelihood with a possession-based exposure offset. The hierarchical random-effects structure combines team, area, team-area, and team-side random effects with shot-type-specific random slopes for key shot categories. We fit the model using approximate Bayesian inference via the Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA), enabling efficient analysis of more than 3× 105 shots from two seasons of B.LEAGUE (the men's professional basketball league in Japan). The STAMP model achieves better out-of-sample predictive performance than simpler baselines, yielding interpretable relative-rate maps and left-right bias summaries. Case studies illustrate how the model reveals team-specific spatial tendencies for comparative analysis, and we discuss its limitations and potential extensions.
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