The price of anarchy in basketball

TL;DR

This paper models basketball offense as a network problem, analyzing how individual shot choices and player removals impact overall team efficiency, revealing counterintuitive effects similar to traffic network paradoxes.

Contribution

It introduces a formal analogy between basketball offense and traffic networks, exploring the impact of strategic shot selection and player removal on offensive efficiency.

Findings

High-percentage shot selection may reduce overall efficiency.

Removing a key player can unexpectedly improve team performance.

Analogies to traffic network paradoxes are applicable to basketball.

Abstract

Optimizing the performance of a basketball offense may be viewed as a network problem, wherein each play represents a "pathway" through which the ball and players may move from origin (the in-bounds pass) to goal (the basket). Effective field goal percentages from the resulting shot attempts can be used to characterize the efficiency of each pathway. Inspired by recent discussions of the "price of anarchy" in traffic networks, this paper makes a formal analogy between a basketball offense and a simplified traffic network. The analysis suggests that there may be a significant difference between taking the highest-percentage shot each time down the court and playing the most efficient possible game. There may also be an analogue of Braess's Paradox in basketball, such that removing a key player from a team can result in the improvement of the team's offensive efficiency.