How Much Is a Disposal Worth?
Here I work with play-by-play data through the Australian Football League’s week 21 (795,944 rows of data) to look at how much individual players’ disposals contribute to scoring.1 I take two different approaches. First, I look at how many points disposals translate into. For each player who has at least 400 disposals this year, how many points are scored, on average, as a result of a possession in which that player had a disposal? Second, I look from the team perspective. What percentage of a team’s goals come as a result of possessions in which a particular player had a disposal?
I crunch the numbers in a jupyter notebook using python and pandas. If you want to see how I did it, you can take a look at the code on my github.
How many points are your disposals worth?
How many of your team goals do you contribute to?
- Thanks as always to Richard Little (https://github.com/alittlefitness/afl_play_by_play) for making these stats available. The following games are missing from the stats, but as I’m working with averages, it’s no big deal:
Round 4 – North Melbourne vs Adelaide
Round 4 – Port Adelaide vs Richmond
Round 7 – Sydney vs Geelong
Round 8 – Brisbane vs Fremantle
Round 8 – Western Bulldogs vs Carlton
Round 9 – Melbourne vs Carlton