Allometric Scaling of Agility and Power Performance in Basketball Players

Abstract

The selection of NBA players usually takes place through the NBA Draft. Assessment of players entering in the draft is made in the NBA pre-draft combine, where each athlete performs a battery of tests composed by body size and basketball-specific agility and power performance. Physiological performance is influenced by body dimensions, and in basketball size is highly valued. Thus, interpretation of performance needs to account appropriately for the influence of body size on performance. In this study we examined the influence of the body dimensions of the NBA Draft Combine test battery performance. Also we examined the validity of the ratio standards or allometric scaling to partition the influence of body dimensions on performance. The performance in the pre-draft assessment of the NBA among 405 athletes from 2010 to 2017 was considered. Players were aged 17.8 to 28.0 years (21.5 ± 1.46 years). Data was extracted from the NBA’s Draft Combine website (https://stats.nba.com/draft/combine/). Correlations between adjusted scores against the size indicator were performed to examine the validity of the partition models. Substantial correlations between athletes´ performance with body size descriptors were observed. Substantial negative correlations were observed between ratio standard adjusted performance and each size descriptor. Allometric adjusted performance presented no correlation with body size descriptors. Based on the performance of highly selected basketball players, the interpretation of basketball players needs to account appropriately for the influence of body dimensions using allometric scaling. Thus, ratio standards should not be used to account for the influence of body dimensions.