Beyond minutes played: Rotation architecture as a persistent club-level signature in elite basketball

Jaime Sampaio, Miguel Ángel Gómez, Francesco Cuzzolin and Julio Calleja-González

PLOS ONE, 2026, vol. 21, issue 10, 1-19

Abstract: Basketball substitutions are usually interpreted as tactical decisions, but repeated substitution sequences may also reveal stable team-level tendencies in how competitive exposure is organised. We reconstructed 65,657 on-court stints from two complete EuroLeague regular seasons and defined a proposed five-indicator team rotation signature (S5), evaluated over two seasons: structural exposure per minute, fragmentation, rotation irregularity, compressed recovery, and fourth-quarter SEI share. Game-level signatures were identifiable above chance, with leave-one-out nearest-centroid accuracies of 26.7% (95% CI [23.2, 30.0]) and 31.1% (95% CI [27.8, 34.5]) against chance levels of 5.6% and 5.0%, and noisy game-level profiles aggregated into reliable seasonal fingerprints. Across the 17 clubs present in both seasons, matched clubs remained closer to their own previous signature than to randomly paired club-season profiles (mean distance 1.68 vs. 2.62; p

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0360790

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0360790

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