Our research project’s purpose is to determine how an international basketball player’s performance is affected by changing leagues. In other words, we will compare a player’s effectiveness in one league to his performance in another. Therefore, this comparison will account for intra-league and cross-league variability. Our project will help Xpheres Basketball Management, a European agency, use a better approach while negotiating player contracts in a different league. Xpheres collected statistics from 25 men’s professional leagues and 71 FIBA tournaments and provided us a sample of their data. Using this sample, we studied players’ statistics such as efficient offensive performance per 40 minutes (EOPx40M), points per 100 team possessions, assists per 100 possessions, and blocks per 100 possessions. We employed a hierarchical model, from a Bayesian perspective, to estimate the average for a few selected performance metrics in weaker leagues and stronger leagues. For example, we compared the averages of these metrics between an Argentinian league and the Spanish ACB league. For the metric, a player’s efficient offensive performance per 40 minutes of play, we concluded that it is significantly affected by switching between the two leagues, with Argentina being significantly higher than the ACB league’s players. We postulated this significant difference is an artifact of the distinct levels of difficulty. With this conclusion in mind, our research project will study more player statistics and account for more variables that may affect a player’s effectiveness, such as age. Once this project is complete, we will gain an accurate understanding of what factors significantly affects a player’s performance.
