Basketball Statistics Blog

Sunday's Reflexions on Basketball Statistics:
About the Number of FTA and Personal Fouls in a Game

Applying the information available from boxscores, with the crew of 3 officials included, using 18 years quality of data, we found nothing at the eBA Basketball Statistics Analysis System Archives.

No individual official, as a factor in the crew of 3 model, had an important effect on the number of FTA and Personal Fouls in a game.

Some other numbers seem to link fouls called to single officials, rather than the crew of 3 officials we had to use in our model.

Concentrating on single officals would make bigger the power of any analysis, for sure, but I still consider unlikely that the results would be statistically significant.

Fouls called by year at the NBA:
2009 finals, 54.6 fouls a game - Playoffs, 51 - Regular Season, 48.5
2008 finals, 51.5 fouls a game - Playoffs 48 - Regular season. 45.5.
2007 finals, 45.5 fouls - 2006, 41.5 - 2005, 49 ..... 2002, 46 - 2001, 46 - 2000, 48.
Finals foul average for preceding 7 years: 47.8.

Photograph from The Pensblog

1- Therefore last year it was the highest PF call rate but not a significant difference with the two recent seasons.
2 - 3.6 more fouls called than in playoffs series is no significant.
3 - It looks like the refs were more rigorous in general, not just in this series.
4 - Playoff games have more fouls called per period, about two per game for home teams and three for away teams. The relative importance of these consequences is very small.
5 - Standard deviation of PF/possession is about 0.05. That means about 5 PF per game.
6 - If a team averages 25 PF per game: one in six games they'll have 30 or more PFs, and two games per season they'll have 35 PFs.
7 - There is really some tendency for a ref to call too many fouls on a team that fouls too much.

A selected excerpt from the discussions at the eBA Annual Analysis System Clinic Chat about this topic "Basketball Personal Fouls".

This topic is resumed in the eBA Basketball Statistics Analysis System
at the eBA Encyclopedia > The Articles

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