High performance of professional basketball play- ers and the settings to measure their regularity: evidence from the Spanish ACB League

Abstract

Obtaining relevant information about the performance of sports teams and players involves an ongoing analysis of factors that affect individual performance, including the use of tools that help estimate the athletic performance of professional players and improve decision making by managers and coaches. The aim of this work is to establish which statistics for basketball players discriminate between high and low performance and regularity using a performance-regularity index. The sample comprised players from the Spanish professional basketball league, the ACB League during the 2014-2015. We divided the sample into players with low, medium and high performance and regularity, and a discriminant analysis associated high numbers of rebounds, assists and steals with high performance and regularity and higher numbers of 3-point shots, turnovers and fouls with low performance and regularity. These results should help coaches and sports managers to design templates and sports gambling strategies that improve performance in their teams.