Basketball game perturbations according to game context and conditions

Abstract

In the last few years team sports are being studied within a complex adaptive systems approach. From this perspective, the importance of game complexity, team self-organization, non-linear and multidimensional performance models has been growing from micro to macro issues. One interesting topic to investigate is the detection of behavioural transitions, or perturbations, that define periods of stability and instability in these systems. Particularly in Basketball, research regarding the identification of perturbations is scarce and mainly centred in game-actions to a player level. To a team level, basketball performance could also be influenced by players’ substitutions, time-outs, teams fourth foul, players’ exclusions or technical fouls. No research is available on how these contextual factors could affect team performance and therefore could be system perturbations. Therefore, this study has the aim of identifying the effects of these contextual factors on team efficacy in several different game conditions (outcome, location, final score differences, period).