If you filled out a March Madness bracket this month, you probably faced the same question with each college match-up: What gives one team an edge over another' Is it a team's record through the regular season' Or the chemistry among its players' Maybe it's the experience of its coaching staff or the buzz around a top scorer. All of these factors play some role in a team's chance to advance. But according to a new study by MIT researchers, there's one member who consistently boosts their team's performance: the data analyst. The new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Sports Economics, quantifies the influence of basketball analytics investment on team performance. The study's authors looked in particular at professional basketball and compared the investment in data analytics on each NBA team with the team's record of wins over 12 seasons. They found that indeed, teams that hired more analytics staff, and invested more in data analysis in general, tended to win...
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