Optimal jersey retirement in the National Basketball Association. (2nd April 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Mildebrath, David; Knight, Wendy; Schaefer, Andrew
• Is Part Of: IISE transactions. Volume 52:Number 4(2020)
• Page Start: 363
• Page End: 376
• Publication Date: 2020-04-02
• Subjects: Entertainment services -- integer programming -- dynamic programming; Industrial engineering -- Periodicals; Systems engineering -- Periodicals; Industrial engineering; Systems engineering; Electronic journals; Periodicals; 670.285
• DOI: 10.1080/24725854.2019.1633030
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2472-5854

Abstract

Abstract: One of the highest honors an individual player in the National Basketball Association (NBA) can receive is to have their jersey number retired by a franchise. Players selected for jersey retirement are often chosen carefully, in part because each franchise has only a finite number of jerseys available for retirement. In this work, we present a method to optimize the selection of players to honor with jersey retirement. We first present a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to model the jersey retirement decisions of a given franchise. We then embed this MDP into a nonlinear regression model, which we solve approximately using a modified support vector machine. Our results indicate that most NBA franchises behave approximately in accordance with our optimality criteria. We also use our model to suggest optimal retirement decisions for several NBA franchises.