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Sports Performance

Clustering performances in the NBA according to players’ anthropometric attributes and playing experience

ORCID Icon, , ORCID Icon, , ORCID Icon & ORCID Icon
Pages 2511-2520 | Accepted 10 Apr 2018, Published online: 20 Apr 2018
 

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was: (i) to group basketball players into similar clusters based on a combination of anthropometric characteristics and playing experience; and (ii) explore the distribution of players (included starters and non-starters) from different levels of teams within the obtained clusters. The game-related statistics from 699 regular season balanced games were analyzed using a two-step cluster model and a discriminant analysis. The clustering process allowed identifying five different player profiles: Top height and weight (HW) with low experience, TopHW-LowE; Middle HW with middle experience, MiddleHW-MiddleE; Middle HW with top experience, MiddleHW-TopE; Low HW with low experience, LowHW-LowE; Low HW with middle experience, LowHW-MiddleE. Discriminant analysis showed that TopHW-LowE group was highlighted by two-point field goals made and missed, offensive and defensive rebounds, blocks, and personal fouls; whereas the LowHW-LowE group made fewest passes and touches. The players from weaker teams were mostly distributed in LowHW-LowE group, whereas players from stronger teams were mainly grouped in LowHW-MiddleE group; and players that participated in the finals were allocated in the MiddleHW-MiddleE group. These results provide alternative references for basketball staff concerning the process of evaluating performance.

Acknowledgments

Project NanoSTIMA: Macro-to-Nano Human Sensing: Towards Integrated Multimodal Health Monitoring and Analytics, NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000016, co-financed by Fundo Europeu de Desenvolvimento Regional (FEDER) - NORTE 2020.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The first author was funded by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) from the Ministry of Education of P.R. China under Grant [(2015) 3022].

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