Overview:

The goal of this assignment was to find high performing, underpaid NBA players to poach using k-means clustering.

Methodology:

1. Find statistics to cluster:

Calculated the correlation of relevant statistics with player salary. This indicated what statistics were a were a good indicator of salary. The two statistics with the highest correlation were points per game and assists per game.

2. Perform Clustering:

Used k-means clustering to group the players into 2 clusters: high performing and low performing.

3. Find underpaid players in high performing cluster:

Once, the high performing cluster was calculated, filtered the data to find the lowest paid but highest performing players.

Clustering of NBA Players

Top Players to Poach

Player Salary Points Per Game Assists Per Game
Trae Young 6571800 26.38 9.44
Luka Doni 8049360 28.63 8.97
DeAaron Fox 8099627 23.02857 7.571429

Analysis

The top players that our team should poach are Trae Young, Luka Doni, and DeAaron Fox. These players have a history of high performance but are not as well compensated as their teammates. Trae Young is especially of note because he is only paid $66k a year and has comparable statistics with the other two players who already make about $15k more than him.