FiT Publishing

The “sophomore slump” is a widely accepted phenomenon in modern sport culture, commonly conceptualized as a decline in performance during a player’s second year of competition following an outstanding first season. This study empirically verified the absence of sophomore slump through a two-stage network data envelopment analysis and Malmquist productivity index analysis of 616 English Premier League players from the 2014–2015 to 2018–2019 seasons. The relative rankings of individual second-year players were compared with their rankings in the previous season, and second-year and non-...Read more

The aim of this work is to evaluate the productivity change of the NBA teams during the last seven seasons (from 2006-07 to 2012-13). Within that period of time, a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) of the National Basketball Association (NBA) was ratified before season 2011-12, ending a 161-day lockout. The Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI) has been used to measure the total factor productivity, while an input-oriented Network DEA approach is used to compute the distance of each observation to the corresponding frontier. The results reveal that there has been technological...Read more