Basketball Teams Play More Selfishly During Playoffs

There may not be an "I" in "team" but there are two in "championship," and basketball players going after one of those play more selfishly. That's what researchers found when they analyzed nine seasons' worth of NBA games. Players who hog the ball might have the right idea—every shot they make leads to a higher salary in the next year. The study was undertaken by two management professors, Eric Uhlmann of HEC Paris and Christopher Barnes of the University of Washington's Foster School of Business. They crunched numbers for all 30 NBA teams between 2004 and 2013, from the regular season through the playoffs, which every team except one* reached at some point. For each game, they measured "cooperative play" by calculating the ratio of assists to baskets made. This way, a higher- or lower-scoring game wouldn't affect the measurement. They also controlled for the number of turnovers in the ...