Marketing, Stats and Basketball

This is a blog about scientific research in basketball , and it is mainly focused on marketing and statistics. The aim of this blog is to disseminate findings from studies conducted by our research group, share ideas, and discuss. You can write either in English or Spanish (but we recommend English in order to make your comments more accessible to international colleagues). We will be happy to count with your opinion regarding the topics we discuss. Welcome to Basket-Research.

Saturday, October 15, 2011

Evidence for a momentum effect in the NBA

Hi all, this is one of my latest publication. This research was a collaboration between Jeremy Arkes, from Naval Posgraduate School of Monterey (California) and me. We created a large data base of NBA games and we ran several logit models to study the existence of a "trend effect", i.e., a "momentum".

This is the abstract of the paper.

No previous study on momentum in team sports has found any valid evidence for a momentum effect—i.e., an effect of success in the past few games, over and above the effect of team quality. We develop an econometric model to determine if there is a momentum effect in the NBA by examining how success over the past few games leads to a higher probability of winning the next game. The model takes into account the home vs. away strengths of the teams in the current game as well as their opponents in the previous games (to calculate measures of “adjusted success over the past few games”). Thus, success in previous games is adjusted for quality of the wins or losses. In addition, we account for rest days before the current game for both teams. Using data over three NBA seasons (2007-2009), we find strong evidence for a positive momentum effect.

You may download the paper here:
http://www.bepress.com/jqas/vol7/iss3/13

This is the recommended citation:

Arkes, Jeremy and Martinez, Jose (2011) "Finally, Evidence for a Momentum Effect in the NBA," Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports: Vol. 7: Iss. 3, Article 13.
DOI: 10.2202/1559-0410.1304

And this is some discussion of other colleagues at APBRmetrics

http://sonicscentral.com/apbrmetrics/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=304


Enjoy!