Basketball Teams as Strategic Networks
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0047445
This article takes games from first round of the NBA playoffs in 2010 and turns them into a network of nodes and edges. In their experiment, players are the nodes and ball movements between them create the edges of the network. This is a study that was used in my Leadership and Management in Sports class recently to discuss basketball strategy aspect of the article, but their methods and way of networking the games can also be applied to Networks. The authors found in this piece that most teams showed a centralized ball distribution pattern centering around the point guard as the main position to distribute the ball around. Along similar lines, they found variations among the individual teams in the relative involvement of the other players/positions.
The research done in this article focused primarily on the variation in network structure in two main ways. The first being whether teams consistently moved the ball towards their shooting specialists, “measured as uphill/downhill” flux, and the second being whether the team distributed the ball in a manner that reduced predictability, measured as team entropy. These metrics relevant to Networks were then used to analyze strategy and see of there was a certain factor that helped to predict team success. In this light the findings were that no single metric was wholly predictive of success but in the context of the 2010 playoffs clustering and network entropy had the most consistent association with advancement as a team.