Injury risk for NBA players: a survival analysis study

Injury risk for NBA players: a survival analysis study

Injuries commonly occur in sports, and their prevention is important for many reasons. Indeed, injuries have economic implications for teams and may psychologically impact athletes. The survival data analysis framework is considered to evaluate the NBA players' injury risk through the use of statistical models for recurrent events. To this extent a unique data set created with a non-trivial harmonization and merging of several data sources (data about the injuries, play-by-play data and a dataset about players’ information) has been considered. All the injuries occurred from the 2010-2011 season to the 2019-2020 season have been examined.

Two separate analyses have been carried out with two different aims:

1. for evaluating the risk of getting injured all the players have been considered

2. for examining the risk of recurrence of injury all the players who got injured at least once were included in the dataset. 

Results suggest that the role of players and the BMI have an important effect on the risk of injury. Moreover, a new variable measuring the weakness of each player has been evaluated to take into account the number of injuries occurred within a short period of time.

The talk will be given by Ambra Macis from the University of Brescia, Department of Economics and Management.