Business Research

Business Research Project Part 2

Shamika Bottom, Lachelle Buford, Jasmine Jeremiah, Barbara Sheppard

QNT/561

May 30, 2016

Dr. Ross DePinto

Introduction

Team Tigers has been regarded as the lowest ranking team in professional basketball.  The team’s management decided to bring on a new team coach, to determine the strengths of the team so they can be maximized.  Upon review, Team Tiger's newest coach identified that the team seemed to perform better in the area of offensive rebounds at home compared to when they play away.

  Wanting the help of expert analysts, Team C was brought in to conduct a formal study on the team’s offensive rebounding data. The focus was to determine if Team Tigers had more offensive rebounds at home games; offensive rebounding seemed to be a significant factor to increase scoring to win games overall, as well as attract and excite home fans, which may increase revenue. To ascertain if there was a potential to reverse the losing team record by focusing on offense rebounding capabilities, a research question and hypothesis were necessary.  For the purpose of this study, the site of the games (playing at home or away) was the qualitative independent variable (IV), and the team’s offensive rebounds per game was the quantitative dependent variable (DV).

The research question for this study was:

RQ: Are the number offensive rebounds per game collected by Team Tigers higher for home games than away games?

The hypotheses associated with the research question were:

HO: The number of offensive rebounds per game is not higher for home games than away games.

HA: The number of offensive rebounds per game is higher for home games than away games.

Literature Review

The Importance of Offensive Rebounds

        Offensive rebounding was one of the most important keys to team success in basketball according to an article written several years ago (Lyons 2005).  In the same article, according to statistical analysis, the team with more offensive rebounds won 63% percent of the games (Lyons 2005).  Author Brian Tungy (2016) noted teams that already have a high percentage of offensive rebounds per game, benefit the most from improving on their game wins resulting from offensive rebounding, specifically by as much as 30%.

Statistical Data and Basketball Strategy Formulation

        Nikolaidis (2015) conducted a review of building a game strategy through statistical analysis. It was concluded that using various statistical techniques such as the Bayes’ theorem in order to optimize the crucial decisions a coach needs to take during a game, could be valuable for forming strategy to focus on increasing performance including offensive rebounds.  Similarly, in the article by Rimler, Song, and Yi (2010), the authors used the Bayesian approach along with the Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation to research and estimate the efficiency of basketball games played between 2005 through 2006.  The research looked at technical efficiency as well as the quality of the team’s resources and compared it to the team’s success to determine which was considered a factor for success.  The research concluded that the quality of the team’s resources produced higher efficiency numbers for productivity and wins while technical efficiency had no significant differences across the board when looking at fourteen teams in the league.