IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/jospec/v26y2025i6p668-688.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Effect of Basketball Analytics Investment on National Basketball Association (NBA) Team Performance

Author

Listed:
  • Henry Wang
  • Arnab Sarker
  • Anette Hosoi

Abstract

In the National Basketball Association (NBA), basketball data and analytics is an area of significant financial investment for all 30 franchises, despite there being little quantitative evidence demonstrating analytics adoption actually improves team-level performance. This study seeks to measure the return on investment of analytics on NBA team success in a time of great demand for analytical front office personnel. Using a two-way fixed effects modeling approach, we identify the causal effect of analytics department headcounts on regular season wins using 12 years of season-level data for each team. We find a positive and statistically significant effect, suggesting clubs that invest more in analytics tend to outperform competitors when controlling for roster characteristics, injuries, difficulty of schedule, and team-specific and time-specific effects. This research contributes to the body of literature affirming the value of data analytics for organizational performance and supports current investments in analytics being made by NBA teams.

Suggested Citation

  • Henry Wang & Arnab Sarker & Anette Hosoi, 2025. "The Effect of Basketball Analytics Investment on National Basketball Association (NBA) Team Performance," Journal of Sports Economics, , vol. 26(6), pages 668-688, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:jospec:v:26:y:2025:i:6:p:668-688
    DOI: 10.1177/15270025251328264
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15270025251328264
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/15270025251328264?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:jospec:v:26:y:2025:i:6:p:668-688. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.