About The Journal

 

The Sports Kernel journal is a way for me to share my independent sports analysis projects and grow my data science skills. I love diving into sports insights and seeing the numbers behind each game, so this is my way of sharing my findings with you all!

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2025 NBA Draft: Breaking Down Player Potential by the Numbers

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With the 2025 NBA Draft right around the corner, prospects are preparing themselves for the biggest leap in their young careers. Will they handle the transition well? Will they become a breakout star in the league? Many questions arise around each prospect this time of year and within this article I aim to provide data-backed reasoning as to who in this class could become a rising star and potential All-Star in the NBA. Although data can provide some clues as to who may breakout in the league, there are obviously so many more factors that come into play to decide the actual outcome of a player and whether they can reach their full potential. Overview In this article I analyze the current prospects against the rising stars and All-Stars from the previous five draft classes across basic and advanced stats categories. Rising stars is very subjective, so I determined the group of rising stars based on general consensus from following the NBA and the media. The data was sourced from RealGM...
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Power vs. Production: A WAR Breakdown for the 2025 Home Run Derby Participants

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As the MLB All-Star break comes to a wrap, we saw a great show of the premier power hitters in the league during the Home Run Derby. Cal Raleigh continued upon his regular season dominance, by winning the 2025 Home Run Derby, but many young and veteran names all gave a great effort. Although the focus is on homeruns during this event, there is so much more to a player's contribution in a game. The Wins Above Replacement (WAR) statistic measures offensive and defensive contributions from a player compared to the teams backup for them, their replacement.  In this study, I focused on analyzing the contribution of homeruns to each Home Run Derby contestant's WAR statistics for the 2025 season. The data was sourced from Pro Baseball Reference and then filtered to only include players with at least one homerun and eliminate duplicates of players that switched teams mid-season. Determining the Average HR Contribution to WAR When looking at the 2025 season and MLB players with at least...
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