Sports Team Success and Managerial Decisions: The Role of Playing Time Concentration

Professional sports teams employ highly paid managers and coaches to train players and make tactical and strategic team decisions. A large literature analyzes the impact of manager decisions on team outcomes. Empirical analysis of manager decisions requires a quantifiable proxy variable for manager decisions. Previous research focused on manager dismissals, tenure on teams, the number of substitutions made in games, or the number of healthy players on rosters held out of games for rest, generally finding small positive impacts of manager decisions on team success. We analyze manager decisions by developing a novel measure of game-specific coach decisions based on a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) of playing-time distribution across players on a team roster in a game. Evidence from two-way fixed effects regression models explaining observed variation in National Basketball Association team winning percentage over the 1999-2000 to 2018-2019 seasons show a significant association between managers allocation of playing time and team success. A one standard deviation change in playing-time HHI that reflects a flattened distribution of player talent is associated with between one and two additional wins per season, holding the talent of players on the team roster constant. Heterogeneity exists in the impact across teams with different player talent. This is one of the first papers to examine playing time concentration in professional sports. Our results are important for understanding how managerial decisions affect the production of wins in team sports.