Descriptive and Predictive Analysis of Euroleague Basketball Games and the Wisdom of Basketball Crowds

In this study we focus on the prediction of basketball games in the Euroleague competition using machine learning modelling. The prediction is a binary classification problem, predicting whether a match finishes 1 (home win) or 2 (away win). Data is collected from the Euroleague's official website for the seasons 2016-2017, 2017-2018 and 2018-2019, i.e. in the new format era. Features are extracted from matches' data and off-the-shelf supervised machine learning techniques are applied. We calibrate and validate our models. We find that simple machine learning models give accuracy not greater than 67% on the test set, worse than some sophisticated benchmark models. Additionally, the importance of this study lies in the "wisdom of the basketball crowd" and we demonstrate how the predicting power of a collective group of basketball enthusiasts can outperform machine learning models discussed in this study. We argue why the accuracy level of this group of "experts" should be set as the benchmark for future studies in the prediction of (European) basketball games using machine learning.