Abstract
The main purpose of this study was to describe the most demanding scenarios of match play in basketball through a number of physical demand measures (high-intensity accelerations and decelerations, relative distance covered, and relative distance covered in established speed zones) for four different rolling average time epochs (30, 60, 180, and 300 s) during an official international tournament. A secondary purpose was to identify whether there were significant differences in physical demand measures among playing positions (centers, guards, and forwards) and levels (two best classified teams in the tournament and remaining teams), match scoring (winning, losing, and drawing), and playing periods (match quarter) at the moment of the most demanding scenarios. Data were collected from 94 male under 18 (U18) elite basketball players (age: 17.4 ± 0.7 years; stature: 199.0 ± 11.9 cm; body mass: 87.1 ± 13.1 kg) competing in a Euroleague Basketball Tournament. Measures were compared via a Bayesian inference analysis. The results revealed the presence of position-related differences [Bayesian factor (BF) > 10 (at least strong evidence) and standardized effect size (δ) > 0.6 (at least moderate)] so that centers covered a lower relative distance at speed zone 1 and had lower high-intensity accelerations and decelerations than guards. However, the Bayesian analysis did not demonstrate the existence of significant differences in any physical demand measure in relation to the playing level, match scoring, and playing periods at the moment of the most demanding scenarios. Therefore, this study provides coaches and strength and conditioning specialists with a most demanding scenario reference on physical demands that can be used as an upper limit threshold in the training and rehabilitation monitoring processes.
Highlights
Basketball is an intermittent, court-based team sport that requires players to perform a substantive number of repeated high-intensity movements such as accelerations and decelerations, changes of direction, high-speed running, jumping, and landing (Ostojic et al, 2006; Scanlan et al, 2011)
A novel approach has been recently suggested to describe the most demanding scenarios of match play through the use of the “peak scores” of relevant physical demand measures after having examined second by second all their scores using rolling average time epochs (e.g., 0–3, 1–4, 2–5 min)
For the Bayesian ANOVA conducted with the time epoch as a fixed factor, the results showed extreme evidence (BF > 100 and percentage error
Summary
Basketball is an intermittent, court-based team sport that requires players to perform a substantive number of repeated high-intensity movements such as accelerations and decelerations, changes of direction, high-speed running, jumping, and landing (Ostojic et al, 2006; Scanlan et al, 2011). Whether the most demanding scenario of a particular physical demand measure occurred between 2 and 5 min during competitive match play, the use of the traditional segmental analysis that take averages from 0–3 and 3–6 min would miss the full peak period, and this would lead to an underestimation of this physical demand measure (Whitehead et al, 2018) These observed differences in players’ physical demands between the sequential and rolling average time epoch approaches seem to increase as the time epoch length decreases (i.e., below 5 min), which may be due to the physiological, contextual, and technical–tactical demands of the sport (Ly et al, 2016; Wagenmakers et al, 2018). It has been suggested that the higher the sample frequency is, the larger the inter-approach differences may be (Doncaster et al, 2019)
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