https://billyfryer.com/ Recent content on Billy Fryer's Website Hugo -- gohugo.io en Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/scenario-trees/ Sat, 13 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/scenario-trees/ Background In 2024, I was the data analyst for the Indiana Fever. As the season progressed, it became increasingly clear that we were going to make the playoffs for the first time in almost a decade. We finally clinched with around 3 games remaining in our season. Naturally, our focus shifted to the playoffs and who our potential opponents were going to be. I did several magic number calculations and had it down to 2 teams, however it wasn’t until a conversation with Fever Broadcaster Pat Boylan that we realized there was a 3rd scenario where we possibly would be going to Vegas as well. https://billyfryer.com/visualizations/al-hs-fb-scenario-trees-2025-october-17/ Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/visualizations/al-hs-fb-scenario-trees-2025-october-17/ Demopolis Jemsion Montevallo Northside Selma Shelby County Sipsey Valley https://billyfryer.com/wbb/expansion-draft-2025-rules-predictions/ Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/wbb/expansion-draft-2025-rules-predictions/ A Brief History of WNBA Expansion WNBA Expansion Timeline from Wikipedia We are in a new Era of WNBA Expansion with 6 new WNBA Teams making their debut from the 2025 season until 2030. Golden State absolutely shattered the ceiling of expansion team fees when they were first announced and that bar has been pushed sky high with the announcement of Philadelphia, Cleveland and the return of Detroit. https://billyfryer.com/wbb/historic-wnba-trade-partners/ Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/wbb/historic-wnba-trade-partners/ As the WNBA Trade Deadline has now officially come and gone, I wanted to take a look at some historical trade partners in the WNBA. In all of sports, teams traditionally have stronger relations with certain other teams typically in a different division, conference or league (depending on how the league is divided). In the WNBA, this effect is compounded due to the limited number of teams. To read the heat maps below, the team on the vertical axis is the team sending something to the team on the horizontal axis. https://billyfryer.com/wbb/me-bounds/ Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/wbb/me-bounds/ This Article was originally posted on 7-16-2025 but has a slight miscalculating in mebounds. All numbers and relevant commentary have been adjusted. In her season and a half in the WNBA, Angel Reese has proven that she is one of the best rebounders in all of basketball. In her own words, “anything that comes off that board is mine”, and that has primarily been true. During the 2024 season, she set the WNBA record for rebounds per game for a single season with 13. https://billyfryer.com/wbb/commissioners-cup-2025-june-14/ Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/wbb/commissioners-cup-2025-june-14/ Tons of games this Saturday with big time implications. Indiana’s defeat of New York has vaulted them into the lead in the Eastern Conference. Out west, Seattle was in the driver’s seat but fell to a Golden State Valkyries team that fought through short handedness with several key players out due to EuroBasket. Now control has shifted back over to the reigning Commissioner’s Cup Champions the Minnesota Lynx. Below are updates on where we’re at! https://billyfryer.com/wbb/commissioners-cup-2025-june-12/ Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/wbb/commissioners-cup-2025-june-12/ The WNBA’s Commissioner’s Cup is halfway through and the race is on to see which 2 teams will face off in the Commissioner’s Cup Championship on July 1. I was able to map out where teams stand given their games played so far and games remaining and wanted to share some unique findings. As more games are played, I’ll continue to post updates on Twitter/BlueSky about tie breakers! Note: When scenarios are referred to by numbers, the numbers have no significance. https://billyfryer.com/wbb/tour-brasil-na-wnba/ Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/wbb/tour-brasil-na-wnba/ This WNBA Preseason, Team Brazil takes on professional opponents of the Chicago Sky (May 2) and the Indiana Fever (May 4) in their “Brazilian Tour in the WNBA”. This tour serves as practice for this summer’s upcoming FIBA Americup in late June/early July in Santiago, Chile where the Brazilians will be slotted in Group A with the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Canada and El Salvador. Below is the tweet posted by @basquetebrasil, the official X account of the Confederação Brasileira de Basketball (Brazilian Basketball Confederation). https://billyfryer.com/projects/national-park-week-2024/ Sun, 21 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/national-park-week-2024/ Getting Access to the NPS Data Happy National Park Week! Right before the WNBA Season starts, I wanted to do a very short and fun project with National Park Data that I found! The article goes through me explaining my favorite parts about the National Park Service (NPS) as well as digging into the National Park API that I recently discovered. This API does require a key which can be freely requested from this website: https://billyfryer.com/projects/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go/ Thu, 08 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go/ Introduction With 2 outs in the bottom of the ninth, the Biloxi Shuckers (AA MIL) were batting down 1 to the Montgomery Biscuits (AA Rays) in a July game coming down the stretch for the 2nd Half Divisional Title. With runners on first and second - both with decent speed - Thomas Dillard singled to right field. The runner on second was waved home and right fielder Kameron Misner’s throw was on target to get the runner by two steps to end the game. https://billyfryer.com/projects/beijing-2022-biathlon-mass-start-clustering/ Wed, 08 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/beijing-2022-biathlon-mass-start-clustering/ Introduction With the warm summer making its presence felt here in many parts of the United States, it is only logical to discuss a sport that is a favorite in snowy Nordic winters: biathlon. After biathlon events, normally all we see is the final ordering of athletes based on their finish times. However, this singular time only provides one value for a sport with multiple phases. In particular, an athlete’s shooting performance has a huge effect on the outcome of their race, hence the name biathlon. https://billyfryer.com/projects/fhstr-package/ Tue, 17 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/fhstr-package/ One of my goals before graduating college was to create my own R package. At times the goal has faded into the background behind new side projects and classes but the dream was always still there. One of those side projects was during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, I did a visualization for every day of the competition. My skills improved tremendously and I knew I had to do it again for the 2022 Beijing Winter Games. https://billyfryer.com/projects/bootstrapping-3-point-contest/ Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/bootstrapping-3-point-contest/ Overview Steph Curry is known for 3 Point Shooting Ability and has competed in the 3 Point Contest a total of 7 times in his career so far, winning it twice. I used bootstrap resampling of Curry’s attempted 3 Pointers during the 2021-22 Season (up to January 1st, 2022) to predict how he would have done in this year’s contest. Format of 3 Point Contest With the 3 Point Contest being littered with sponsorships by companies such as Mtn. https://billyfryer.com/projects/rule-changes-affecting-extra-inning-game-length-in-pioneer-baseball-league/ Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/rule-changes-affecting-extra-inning-game-length-in-pioneer-baseball-league/ Abstract In recent years, Major League Baseball has tried to reduce the length of games as well as cut costs of operation. They began attempting to reduce game time in 2018 by implementing a rule in all levels of Minor League Baseball that during extra innings there will be a runner starting on second base. This rule was deemed a success and was then implemented in MLB games. Then, for the 2021 season, Major League Baseball contracted many Minor League Baseball teams around the country to cut costs of player salaries. https://billyfryer.com/projects/intro-tutorials/ Thu, 12 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/intro-tutorials/ I have created a series of tutorials to help those new to sports analytics become learn about the programming language R! These tutorials were used during Fall 2021 to help teach the Sports Analytics Club at NC State and were recorded. The link to the recordings as well as the code are linked below: Link to Code Link to Recordings The topics covered in each tutorial are listed below: https://billyfryer.com/projects/nba-all-average-team/ Thu, 15 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/projects/nba-all-average-team/ This project focuses on the idea of a statistically average NBA Team. The idea stems from the NBA naming All-NBA teams every year. Especially with lots of teams employing the tanking strategy (notably the 76ers in the mid-2010s and the 76ers during the “Trust the Process” phase in the 2010s), we were hoping to see if a statistically average NBA would be competitive against some of these teams. To do this, we took a players per game stats and then scale them between 0 and 1 in comparison to other players in the league. https://billyfryer.com/contact/ Mon, 25 Feb 2019 13:38:41 -0600 https://billyfryer.com/contact/ ** Contact page don’t contain a body, just the front matter above. See form.html in the layouts folder ** https://billyfryer.com/elements/ Mon, 18 Feb 2019 12:27:33 -0600 https://billyfryer.com/elements/ Font Sizes A A A A A A A A 6rem (96px) 5rem (80px) 3rem (48px) 2.25rem (36px) 1.5rem (24px) 1.25rem (20px) 1rem (16px) .875rem (14px) Type Samples Head­line Sub­head­line Level 1 Heading One page to rule them all...well, not really. This page displays sample typography and page elements to illustrate their style. Things like headings and paragraphs showing the beautiful type scale, form elements, tabular data, and image layouts just to name a few. https://billyfryer.com/wbb/wbb-data-viz-22-23/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/wbb/wbb-data-viz-22-23/ Duke WBB December 29, 2022 Tobacco Road upset for Duke WBB coached by Kara Lawson absolutely lighting it up from 3 shooting 64% including Celeste Taylor going 5-6 from 3 and Elizabeth Balogun shooting 100% from the floor and ft line. Notre Dame December 18, 2022 The key to Notre Dame’s win over Virginia Tech was holding the Hokies to their worst shooting performance of the season to date. https://billyfryer.com/license/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/license/ My blog posts are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. https://billyfryer.com/visualizations/milb/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/visualizations/milb/ Nolan Gorman Home Run Streak April 18, 2022 Cardinals Prospect Nolan Gorman is on an incredible streak of 6 home runs in 6 games! Gorman is currently at AAA Memphis and his streak covers multiple series including opponents Charlotte (AAA CWS) and Gwinnett (AAA ATL) including a 4 day home run streak according to Tyler Maun of milb.com Josh Lowe Callup October 13, 2021 At last, Tampa Bay calls up prospect Josh Lowe from AAA Durham. https://billyfryer.com/visualizations/olympics/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 https://billyfryer.com/visualizations/olympics/ Tokyo 2020 Beijing 2022