Beyond minutes played: Rotation architecture as a persistent club-level signature in elite basketball
5 affiliations
- 1Research Center in Sports Sciences, Health Sciences and Human Development (CIDESD), University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro (UTAD), Vila Real, Portugal
- 2Performance Advisory Board, EuroLeague Players Association (ELPA), Barcelona, Spain
- 3Facultad de Ciencias de la Actividad Física y del Deporte, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
- 4UCAM, Catholic University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain
- 5Department of Physical Education and Sports, Faculty of Education and Sport, University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain
Abstract
Basketball substitutions are usually interpreted as tactical decisions, but repeated substitution sequences may also reveal stable team-level tendencies in how competitive exposure is organised. We reconstructed 65,657 on-court stints from two complete EuroLeague regular seasons and defined a proposed five-indicator team rotation signature (S5), evaluated over two seasons: structural exposure per minute, fragmentation, rotation irregularity, compressed recovery, and fourth-quarter SEI share. Game-level signatures were identifiable above chance, with leave-one-out nearest-centroid accuracies of 26.7% (95% CI [23.2, 30.0]) and 31.1% (95% CI [27.8, 34.5]) against chance levels of 5.6% and 5.0%, and noisy game-level profiles aggregated into reliable seasonal fingerprints. Across the 17 clubs present in both seasons, matched clubs remained closer to their own previous signature than to randomly paired club-season profiles (mean distance 1.68 vs. 2.62; p < .001). Game state affected rotation depth far more than the signature: a 20-point margin explained 14.33% of within-club variance in effective rotation but 0.80% in signature deviation. Structural consolidation was not detectably associated with winning. However, clubs concentrating structural exposure in the fourth quarter won fewer games (r = −0.38, 95% CI [−0.66, −0.05]); this exploratory association replicated in both seasons but attenuated after controlling for previous-season success and should not be read causally. Rotation architecture therefore behaves as a comparatively persistent club-level property rather than a by-product of in-game substitution decisions.
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BibTeX
@article{sampaio2026beyond,
title = {{Beyond minutes played: Rotation architecture as a persistent club-level signature in elite basketball}},
author = {Jaime Sampaio and Miguel Ángel Gómez and Francesco Cuzzolin and Julio Calleja-González},
journal = {PLOS One},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0360790},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360790},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Beyond minutes played: Rotation architecture as a persistent club-level signature in elite basketball
AU - Jaime Sampaio
AU - Miguel Ángel Gómez
AU - Francesco Cuzzolin
AU - Julio Calleja-González
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/27
JO - PLOS One
DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0360790
UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0360790
AB - Basketball substitutions are usually interpreted as tactical decisions, but repeated substitution sequences may also reveal stable team-level tendencies in how competitive exposure is organised. We reconstructed 65,657 on-court stints from two complete EuroLeague regular seasons and defined a proposed five-indicator team rotation signature (S5), evaluated over two seasons: structural exposure per minute, fragmentation, rotation irregularity, compressed recovery, and fourth-quarter SEI share. Game-level signatures were identifiable above chance, with leave-one-out nearest-centroid accuracies of 26.7% (95% CI [23.2, 30.0]) and 31.1% (95% CI [27.8, 34.5]) against chance levels of 5.6% and 5.0%, and noisy game-level profiles aggregated into reliable seasonal fingerprints. Across the 17 clubs present in both seasons, matched clubs remained closer to their own previous signature than to randomly paired club-season profiles (mean distance 1.68 vs. 2.62; p < .001). Game state affected rotation depth far more than the signature: a 20-point margin explained 14.33% of within-club variance in effective rotation but 0.80% in signature deviation. Structural consolidation was not detectably associated with winning. However, clubs concentrating structural exposure in the fourth quarter won fewer games (r = −0.38, 95% CI [−0.66, −0.05]); this exploratory association replicated in both seasons but attenuated after controlling for previous-season success and should not be read causally. Rotation architecture therefore behaves as a comparatively persistent club-level property rather than a by-product of in-game substitution decisions.
SN - 1932-6203
ER -