After almost eight months of work, the Federation of Entre Ríos closed an agreement on advanced statistics with the Concepción del Uruguay Regional Faculty of the National Technological University (FRCU) and the Concordia Regional Faculty of the UTN (FRCON) to carry out a development consisting of the generation of a website to visualize advanced statistics, based on data from matches of the First Division Men’s Provincial League.
The formal presentation was made virtually and was attended by the president of the FBER, Julio Giménez, and the Deans of both Faculties, Engineer Jorge Penco, from Concordia and Engineer Martín Herlax, from Concepción del Uruguay. The project has as references the coaches Gabriel Piccato, the best specialist in the field at the national level and current main coach of the Argentine National Team, and the coach Luciano Correa, renowned coach of Entre Ríos who is in charge of UTN basketball Concordia and joined the initiative proposed by his colleague who today also leads Hispano Americano in the National League.
The work will be carried out with all the scientific capacity of the GIBD (Database Research Group) led by Engineer Anabella De Battista. The beginning will be with the analysis of data from the matches of the last two seasons of the Provincial First League (2018-2019 and 2019-2020) and then continue to other categories.
Giménez thanked Picatto and Correa for having thought of the Federation to carry out this initiative and stated that “it is a source of pride for Entre Ríos. Expanding the sports part to these academic horizons commits us to continue working and to bet heavily on an academic, educational and sports interrelation. This advanced statistics project will allow us to enhance the different levels of our basketball and will undoubtedly be an extremely useful tool for the development of sport ”.
Piccato had the idea and channeled it through Correa, the Federation and the university part. “We got to work with Luciano on this possibility and I am really very grateful that there was an impressive synergy, two academic fields working together for a common project and above all to be able to begin to answer questions for those who have the concern and who can be accessible to everyone. Undoubtedly it will serve a little to assess our history and put it in numbers. That seems more important to me because if we are not in the field of the merely subjective, and although the emotional is important, it would not be a disjunctive to have a number to indicate the different circumstances of the game, “he valued.
The coach of the Selection, precisely, spoke about the importance of advanced statistics in the modern game. “We have been trying to understand the game from another side for a long time. In recent years, the experience has been very strong regarding the opening of a new world such as that of statistics, the great flow of information and, related to that, handling Big Data. So I started asking a lot of questions that came up to me; I began to read a certain story of what I am passionate about that is done in other countries, and my question was why in the country there is no place where we can go to find out what the history is from the numbers of our competition. For example, who was the top scorer in certain values in the incidence of three-point shots or which national player had a more relevant weight in different tournaments. I was lucky enough to direct a player like Leonardo Gutiérrez, who won 10 LNB but we do not have a numerical endorsement that can describe the weight of that player in those 10 titles. However, the NBA does have it from Michael Jordan throughout its history. So I was wondering why not and how this exceeds me, I tried to seek help, “he explained.
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