Characterizing patterns of scoring and ties in competitive sports

Abstract

Sports audiences’ sense of excitement originates from a multitude of factors such as the uncertainty in the outcome of a game and the expectation of winning streaks. The uncertainty factor can be said to be maximized when the game is tied. At the same time, a tie represents the antipode to the ultimate goal-to win-of the contestants and the wishes of their loyal fans. A tie therefore encourages the contestants to continually adapt to the situations and strategize to break it, leading to an even more dynamic and engrossing gameplay. A key to understanding this phenomenon starts from the characteristic dynamics of ties and scoring events in sports games. Here we analyze the complete data from a full season of the National Basketball Association (NBA), the professional basketball league of the United States and Canada, to find the patterns of scoring and ties and how they correlate with the interactive nature of sports, and show how they differ from traditional simple random models based on cruder summary statistics that can show their insufficiencies on fine details of gameplay. Given the social and economic significance of such enterprises, these types of findings will prompt the much-needed developments in detailed modeling of sports based on actual data.