From Players to Teams: Towards a Multi-Level Approach of Game Constraints in Team Sports

To explore the complexity of the game balance that gives rise to individual actions, the present study examined the multi-level nature of the game constraints that afford the action of a drive in basketball (dyadic attacker-defender versus inter-team relationships). On the basis of 33 play sequences including a drive, the positional data of the ten male professional basketball players were analyzed using an ecological dynamics approach. The results mainly revealed: a) that the pre-existing conditions that constrained the drives were only of inter-team level; the beginning of the action occurred after a lateral disturbance in the coordination between teams' geometrical centres combined with sustained lateral fluctuations in the stretch indices coordination; and b) the importance of time scale for observing these relevant fluctuations; we used 3-s, 1-s, and 0.5-s time intervals, but only the 0.5 time scale discriminated the significant variability differences. These results offer new insight into a team-oriented view of the game constraints that call for specific individual actions.