Performance indicators that distinguish winning and losing teams in basketball

Gabor Csataljay, Peter O’Donoghue, Mike Hughes and Henriette Dancs

International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport, 2009, vol. 9, issue 1, 60-66

Abstract: To prepare a team for basketball games, to build up the best tactics, to make good decisions during a game, coaches need to know which elements of matches are the most crucial ones. Especially at close games where there is small difference between the performances of two teams. The main purpose of this study was to identify those critical performance indicators that most distinguish between winning and losing performances within matches. The statistical analysis of basketball games can lead to the identification of many significant performance indicators, not all of which can be analysed in real time. Therefore, a smaller subset of critical performance indicators can be identified by analysing close matches only. Data from 54 matches were gathered from the official score sheets of the European Basketball Championship 2007. Cluster analysis was used to classify the matches into three types such as tight games, balanced games and unbalanced games. There were 28 of these matches that were close matches where the differences between the two teams were 9 points or less. Wilcoxon signed ranks tests were used to compare 18 performance indicators between the winning and losing teams within each type of match. There were 13 significant performance indicators for the full set of matches. This was reduced to 6 critical performance indicators when only the close matches were considered. The analysis of tight matches explored that the winning teams had significantly less 3 point attempts (p<0.05) with higher shooting percentage (p<0.01). The number of successful free throws (p<0.01), the free throw percentage (p<0.001) and the number of defensive rebounds (p<0.01) also contributed to achieve a higher number of scored points and consequently determined success.

Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24748668.2009.11868464 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rpanxx:v:9:y:2009:i:1:p:60-66

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RPAN20

DOI: 10.1080/24748668.2009.11868464

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport is currently edited by Peter O'Donoghue

More articles in International Journal of Performance Analysis in Sport from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().