Basketball is a team sport, where interactions occur with both teammates and opponents. Therefore, although it is a sport that has been studied from many different disciplines such as biomechanics (Morales-Toapanta et al., 2018), psychology (Rodríguez-López and Sáez-Rodríguez, 2009), or physiology (Calleja et al., 2008), it must also be analyzed from a perspective where motor interaction is taken into account (Hernández-Mendo et al., 2000) because the player and his/her technical–tactical reading are the protagonists.

Nowadays, basketball is more physical, technical, tactical, and studied by coaches than before, and it is increasingly harder to get offensive advantages that allow to score points, so we try to take advantage of any situations in the attack phase from the first moment when the team has the ball. Most authors (De Torres and Arjonilla, 1999; Carballo and Dopico, 2005; Bazanov et al., 2006) differentiate three ways of attacking: counterattack, transition, and positional attack.

Generally called as transition play, the second wave of counterattack or as defined by the National School of Coaches (2010) play on, it involves those intermediate movements that a team performs after a direct counterattack is not completed, keeping the control of the ball. It arranges the players in the appropriate position on the field to initiate some movements, previously established by the coach, and without stopping the ball, with the aim of surprising and creating an offensive advantage. Individual and/or collective technical-tactical effectiveness makes that going along with the defense, carrying out the defensive balance, becomes as transcendental in high competition sport (Lozano, 2014).

Transitions are one of the least studied tactical aspects in basketball as they only represent approximately from 7 to 12% of all possessions in a game (Cruz and Tavares, 1998; Fernandes and Tavares, 2004). These play situations require the athlete to take decisions quickly, processing intuitively, automatically, and unconsciously the information coming from the environment (Kahneman, 2011). As they are unpredictable situations, it makes them difficult to defend, so improving this facet of the game using incidental strategies by manipulating contextual variables could make teams be more competitive (Camacho-Lazarraga, 2016).

One of the most recurrent offensive tactical means is the direct block (Nunes et al., 2016; Romarís-Durán, 2016), defined as the collective action of the two-on-two (2 × 2) play, where the attacker without the ball performs a block (hinders an opponent by placing himself/herself in his path) helping to his/her mate who is having the ball (Cárdenas, 2010; Muñoz-Arroyave et al., 2015; Nunes et al., 2016). It is so important that it is the most used action to end attack situations in ACB League (Romarís Durán et al., 2013). On the other hand, the one-on-one (1 × 1) is present in 58% of attacks finished outside the zone and 23% of attacks finished inside the zone (Lehto et al., 2010). Therefore, its study added to other tactical means is extremely interesting for coaches who aim to optimize their team play (Nunes et al., 2016).

Nowadays, using Observational Methodology (OM) in high-performance sport links in an optimal way the relationship between science and its practical application because it is applied on its natural context, being focused on the spontaneous and habitual behavior of the observed participants (Anguera, 1990; Anguera and Hernández-Mendo, 2013; Sánchez-Algarra and Anguera, 2013), such as competition. In addition to the possibility of developing an ad hoc observation instrument (Sarmento et al., 2010) adapted to the reality of a given context, it allows a detailed analysis of the behaviors involved in the tactical development of the game.

OM has been successfully applied in basketball (Hernández-Mendo et al., 2000; Romarís Durán et al., 2013; Muñoz-Arroyave et al., 2015), highlighting the impact of using polar coordinate analysis as a specific technique for studying the relationships established among the behaviors happened (Nunes et al., 2016). It is a technique that has also shown useful for other collective sports studies as taken for soccer (Echeazarra-Escudero et al., 2015; Castañer et al., 2016, 2017; Maneiro and Amatria, 2018; Maneiro et al., 2019), handball (Sousa et al., 2015; Morillo-Baro et al., 2017; Jiménez-Salas et al., 2020a,b; Quiñones et al., 2020), or beach handball (Morillo-Baro et al., 2015; Vázquez-Diz et al., 2019a,b).

The polar coordinate technique uses a sequential prospective and retrospective lag analysis of recorded behaviors (Sackett, 1980; Anguera, 1997; Anguera et al., 1997). It allows a great reduction in the amount of the analyzed data as well as in the graphical representation of the relationships established between focal and conditioned categories in a system of vectors (Hernández-Mendo and Anguera, 1999). The contrast statistic of this analysis is the Zsum (Zsum = Σz/√n, where n is the number of lags) (Cochran, 1954). The distribution of this Zsum parameter has a x = 0 and an Sx = 1. The relationships among behaviors and their vector representation are obtained from those values. A value is considered statistically significant when the module of the vector is equal to or greater than 1.96. This value is obtained by the square root of the addition of the square of the Zsum of X (prospective) and the square of the Zsum of Y (retrospective):

The angle of the vector (ϕ = Arc sine of Y/Radius) will determine the excitatory or inhibitory nature of the relationship (Castellano and Hernández-Mendo, 2003).

Considering that background, the aim of this study is to evaluate using polar coordinates analysis the behaviors happening in the application of the individual technical–tactical means one-on-one in the transition play of professional basketball teams in Spain. And subsequently, make predictions using different statistical modeling techniques in order to estimate the best model explaining the relationship between focal behaviors and mating behaviors.

The design of this study was placed in the fourth quadrant (Anguera et al., 2011); defined as follow-up, nomothetic, and multidimensional.

This study, carried out by observing games of a professional basketball team in the Spanish league (ACB), has the objective of analyzing the relationships between the behaviors occurring when using individual technical-tactical means at the beginning of the transition phase and the defense carrying out the defensive balance.

Data quality and generalizability analyses results show that the design of the ad hoc tool is correct and it allows the reliable recording of the actions under study. Polar coordinates analysis has been shown to be a useful technique for the exploration of the relationships established between the behaviors of a tactical situation in competitive sport as it has also been shown in other collective sports (Vázquez-Diz et al., 2019a,b). Thus, the results of polar coordinate analysis have shown statistically significant mating behaviors in the onset with outside one-on-one play.

Although transitions take about only 10% of all game possessions (Cruz and Tavares, 1998; Fernandes and Tavares, 2004), according to Cruz and Tavares (1998), winning teams have a significantly higher percentage of transitions in the game compared with losing teams. In addition, Gómez (2007) observed an efficiency of around 60% in transitions. Therefore, its study can be very interesting to optimize the play and achieve a victory.

The results found seem to indicate that the observed team, Unicaja de Málaga, does not play enough this type of game by concepts and is less predictable, so it could become a more predictable team from the tactical point of view and, so, easier to analyze by the rivals. From this point of view, this mixed method study allows us to explore the tactical behaviors of the teams defining intervention procedures that will optimize resources during training for the competition (Jiménez-Salas et al., 2020b), showing indications of behaviors that allow to make tactical interpretation of the game and the definition of intervention programs to improve the performance in the team (Vázquez-Diz et al., 2019a).

Direct blocking as a tactical means to create and benefit from a greater advantage produced by a defensive disorganization is one of the most used tactical means in the ACB League and it is the second most used means for finishing an action in transitions (Romarís-Durán, 2016). The one-on-one at the beginning of this phase of the game has been shown in more than 15% of the transitions in the ACB League; and just like the direct block, this action is used to obtain advantage finishing the play, being more used in the outside the zone play than in the inside the zone play, because transitions without inside the zone play obtain better results than transitions with inside the zone play (Romarís Durán et al., 2013; Serna-Bardavío et al., 2017).

The results obtained after the polar coordinates analysis with the focal behavior one-on-one outside the zone show a clearly defined tendency. Relationships of mutual excitement are established with a tight score but not managing to overcome the opponent, so those actions lead to situations without tactical advantage that support an offensive success achievement, executing outside the left zone, which is consistent with the results obtained in other studies where the most used areas were outside of the zone and the sides (Muñoz-Arroyave et al., 2015; Serna-Bardavío et al., 2017). On the other hand, the one-on-one outside of the zone presents a mutual inhibition relationship with the play inside the zone as well as an unbalanced score in favor.

The findings of this research can be used by coaches and trainers, from both, teams and national teams, in order to analyze the possible patterns in the play of the opponents they are going to face, with the aim of improving the level of preparation of their own players against those opponents. Those data could help in the design and planning of training sessions where those patterns are simulated as well as the best way to counteract them. For all these reasons, it would be of great interest to continue exploring this researching line, in order to have more and more studies to compare the results with. Function estimation combined with polar coordinate analysis is a powerful and novel tool allowing to estimate from the focal category (UxE in this case), the relationship between this focal behavior and the rest of the mating behaviors for possible future observations.

This study, focused on only one team, has shown all the virtues in the analysis technique; however, it also shows limitations that should be considered, such as the impossibility of contrasting the information obtained with highly relevant facets of the game, as it could be the receiver of a possible rebound or the reception place for the first pass. Limitations that could be solved by designing new observation tools focused on the other phases in the play, proposals that become future lines of research for this sport, as well as applying them to several national and/or international competitions in different categories and/or gender to explore how they behave in those areas.

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

AH-M, VM-S, RR-G, JP-B, RL, BT-G, and JV-D participated in the study design and data collection, performed statistical analyses and contributed to the interpretation of the results, wrote the manuscript, approved the final manuscript as submitted, and reviewed and provided feedback to the manuscript. All authors made substantial contributions to the final manuscript.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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