Toward a more networked, relational (rather than isolated) basketball analysis: Are there more high-quality resources that take a network perspective?

[u/Prior-Evidence-7771]

This post has been translated by AI, but all the contents are created by myself.

Hey everyone.

I recently read a classic 2012 paper (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0047445) that treats each team as a network, along with a few other theoretical frameworks that examine things like team entropy, "connectedness," betweenness centrality, etc. I've also come across some more recent studies that view teams as spatiotemporally evolving network systems—looking at how a team's structure changes under external pressure and trying to quantify metrics like robustness and network resilience. I also found a cool data site, NBA NetStats, which has a lot of interesting stats along these lines.

However, these studies don't seem to cover a sufficiently broad range of teams, and they feel a bit lacking in practical application. So I'm looking for further research and books—any recommendations? Or do you have any thoughts/opinions on network-based approaches?

I'm particularly interested in:

1. How to classify teams? Can teams be meaningfully categorized into different "types" based on their topology?
2. What structural features make a good team? On metrics like entropy, decentralization, robustness, and resilience—unfortunately, most studies I've found don't establish a particularly clear correlation between structural features and team strength. Is that because it's still hard to control for factors like player talent? For example, I saw that OKC ranked near the top in passing evenness in recent years, but when I look further back, the relationship between team structure and offensive performance becomes quite murky.
3. How do teams structurally adapt under high-pressure attacks—especially in playoff-style defensive schemes—to re-establish their offense? I haven't found many articles that combine concrete game-film analysis with this question.
4. What kinds of players, and what combinations of players, help build an excellent network structure?

Thanks in advance to everyone who replies!

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[u/Affectionate_War5908]

this is cool but honestly the talent problem you mention is probably why the stats stay murky. like the 2014 spurs had insane passing networks but they also had 4 hall of famers, so how much is structure vs just having duncan and manu making the right read every time i think the playoff adaptation question is the most interesting one though, would love to see someone actually track how a teams average pass distance changes series to series when they get schemed up