Identifying standards for postseason advancement: a case of the National Basketball Association

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper identifies a standard for postseason advancement and predicts whether a team will advance when criteria are known but requirements are undetermined. A frontier function for advancing teams is constructed based on their past statistics of influential performance factors. The difference between a team's performance and the frontier function indicates whether a team will advance. The importance of each performance factor and team efficiency (TE) after a certain number of regular‐season games is identified. The ratio of a team's actual winning percentage to its highest winning percentage indicates the in‐season TE. Data from advancing teams in the National Basketball Association (NBA) over 11 years are collected. The difference between the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference and the changes in NBA playing styles are analyzed. The results predict whether stakeholders’ teams will advance and provide managers and coaches a metric to measure the optimal performance and direction of improvement.