Rising Lions: In Pursuit of Right Players for IPL

• Sahadeb Sarkar
• Pulkit Taluja

Rising Lions is a newly formed franchise in the Indian Premier League (IPL), and is one of the two new teams that came into existence after two existing teams (i.e., Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals) were suspended by the RM Lodha Committee, appointed by the Supreme Court of India to investigate the 2013 IPL corruption. The released players (about 50) from the suspended teams were to be auctioned soon. Rising Lions’ team manager, Alex John quickly hired a data analytics expert Harsh Chandra, an MBA in analytics from one of India’s premier business schools to identify the right players to target and devise a strategy for the upcoming auctions. Harsh decided to rank the players available to find out their relative value within each of three groups, namely, batsmen, bowlers and all-rounders. There were several questions crisscrossing Harsh’s mind: for example, which parameters/criteria to use while ranking these players? How to rank them and which ranking method to use among several possible alternatives?

After going through the case and attempting the suggested case questions, the students will be able to the enhance the understanding of following statistical concepts:

• Pearson’s Chi Square test to check whether the frequency distribution of certain events observed in a sample is consistent with a particular hypothesized theoretical distribution.
• Understanding the difference between weighted average of parameter score values and weighted average of parameter rankings.
• Understanding the concept of the Mahalanobis distance or multivariate statistical distance, and subsequently using it for ranking.