TeamSkill and the NBA: Applying lessons from virtual worlds to the real-world

In this paper, we build on our previous work by evaluating several approaches for assessing the skill of players and teams on the basis of both individual performance and group cohesion, or “team chemistry”, using game data from the National Basketball Association (NBA). Previously developed for skill assessment in team-based multi-player video games (e.g., Halo 3), we find that group cohesion is a predictive feature in virtual and real-world team-based games, and that methods utilizing such features can often outperform the baseline in both contexts. Additionally, we observe a strong positive correlation between the predictive accuracy of our group cohesion-based approaches and the duration of playing time between a particular configuration of players on a team and their opponents, or “match-up” length.