Sports analytics students predict NBA honors winners
David Almona and Vedant Bhong can’t quite see the future, but they did create a tool that gave them a leg up in predicting award winners for one professional sports league.
In their Statistical Modeling class with Margaret V. Haggin Professor of Mathematics and Data Science Jeffrey Heath, the Centre students explored sports analytics by building models to predict end-of-season NBA honors.
Almona, class of 2026, and Bhong ’25 collaborated on the project, originally inspired by Almona’s interest in sports analytics. By diving into the NBA players’ statistics throughout the season, they applied what they learned in class to predict the top honorees.
“We ran models that were predicting the people with the highest chance of getting selected for NBA Honors,” Bhong said. “One of our models was so accurate, we predicted nine out of the 10 players named to the All-Rookie team correctly, literally the day before they actually announced the honors.”
Along with predicting the All-Rookie honorees, Almona and Bhong also found success forecasting All-NBA and All-Defensive teams. Because the NBA honors are widely anticipated and debated, these analytics provide a valuable, objective lens.
“For basketball enthusiasts and fans, our project offers an analytical perspective on how players earn prestigious NBA honors,” said Almona. “We’re going beyond subjective opinions with statistical indicators. It demonstrated a practical application making complex concepts more accessible and relevant to a wider audience.”
Both Almona and Bhong see potential careers in sports analytics thanks to their work at Centre. In particular, Bhong recalled hearing a guest speaker discuss his analytics work in Major League Soccer. That inspired Bhong to enroll in the Statistical Modeling class and consider sports analytics as a possible career field.
“Dr. Heath called a sports analytics professional from Charlotte FC to speak to us, which was pretty amazing,” he said. “It was really interesting to hear what their job was. That led me to take this class with Dr. Heath. The field of sports analytics is very fascinating.”
Similarly, Almona plans to further explore opportunities in sports analytics and build on what he learned through this project.
“This project provided a great experience in the entire statistical study process,” he said. “I’ve learned critical skills in sports analytics where understanding player performance, predicting outcomes and informing strategic decisions are important.”
