Authors: Yves de Saá Guerra, Juan Manuel Martín González and Juan Manuel García Manso. IX World Congress of Performance Analysis of Sport. 1, Worcester, West Midlands (UK). Ed. ISPAS. 2012. ISBN 978-1-1361-6737-9

Abstract

The final score in a basketball game determinate the result of the game. The scoring evolution is a process with a high uncertainty. It is a process highly dynamic and non-linear type. Everything depends upon the equality between teams and the agents which are involved in the system(Chatterjee & Yilmaz 1999; Bar-Yam 2003; Vaz de Melo et al. 2008; Yarrow et al. 2009; Sampaio et al. 2010). The more uncertainty present in the league (equality among teams), the more attractive will be and it will be able to collect more resources (Ziv et al. 2010; de Saá Guerra et al. 2012). A priori, we cannot know the behavior of basketball game scoring, because we do not know, in advance, how big the runs of points will be or how often. The points are supposed to reflect a completely random dynamic (stochastic behavior). We analyzed all the games and the dynamics of the score of these basketball games of five NBA regular seasons (2005-06; 2006-07; 2007-08, 2008-09; 2009-10). 1230 games per season, with a total of 6150 games. These do not behave uniformly, but present more predictable areas. Exists different areas of behavior related with the score and each zone has a different nature. There are points that we can consider as tipping points. The presence of these critical points suggests that there are phase transitions (Vicsek 2002; Amaral & Ottino 2004; Scheffer et al. 2009) where the dynamic scoring of the games varies significantly. Regarding the final result, the most of the games (65%) ended with a difference of between 1 and 11 points, 33% had a difference of between 11 and 28 points, and only 2% did so with a difference of 28 or more points. We can distinguish at least, three areas, in relation to the dynamic of the game: The first one correspond with 0 and 10 points differences. In this case the final result is the most unpredictable. The second one extends from 10 to 28 points differences approximately. The strategy is well defined and is more predictable. Finally, more than 28 points, the game is broken and there exist a clear superiority of a team over the other. The final outcome is pretty predictable.