Measuring sport performances under pressure by classification trees with application to basketball shooting

Abstract

Measuring players' performance in team sports is fundamental since managers need to evaluate players with respect to the ability to score during crucial moments of the game. Using Classification and Regression Trees (CART) and play-by-play basketball data, we estimate the probabilities to score the shot with respect to a selection of game covariates related to game pressure. We use scoring probabilities to develop a player-specific shooting performance index that takes into account for the difficulty associated to score different types of shots. By applying this procedure to a large sample of 2016–2017 Basketball Champions League (BCL) and 2017–2018 National Basketball Association (NBA) games, we compare the factors affecting shooting performance in Europe and in the United States and we evaluate a selection of players in terms of the proposed shooting performance index with the final aim of providing useful guidelines for the team strategy.

Keywords:

• Classification trees
• basketball
• play-by-play
• performance evaluation
• strategical decisions

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Paola Zuccolotto, Marica Manisera and Serhat Ugur for the valuable contribution.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Rodolfo Metulini http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9575-5136

Notes

1 http://www.fiba.basketball/documents

2 https://official.nba.com/rulebook/

3 According to the value chosen in [40].

4 As a matter of fact, variable miss.t${}_{ij}$ has no relevant impact on BCL case study and we believe that ignoring this variable does not alter the results in this case study.

Additional information

Funding

Research carried out in collaboration with the Big&Open Data Innovation Laboratory (BODaI-Lab), University of Brescia (project nr. 03-2016), title Big Data Analytics in Sports (http://bodai.unibs.it/bdsports/index.htm), granted by Fondazione Cariplo and Regione Lombardia.