INTRODUCTION: In basketball, points per possession measures the performance efficiency. Although the number of possessions in a game is not usually recorded on the box scores, the number of field-goal-attempts (FGA), offensive-rebounds (OREB), turnovers (TOV), and free-throw-attempts (FTA) found on common box score data can be used to estimate the number of possessions in a game. The possession-ending free throws is only a fraction of the number of free throws that is not identifiable from the box score, and the commonly used weighting (?) of 0.44 was based on the data from NBA (Kubatko et al., 2007). The purpose of the study was to examine the ratio of possession-ending free throws to the total number of free throws in a game for the FIBA men`s world cup and to compare the recorded number of possessions to the estimated number of possessions from the box score data. METHODS: Seventy-six games (48 games from the preliminaries) of 2019 FIBA men`s World Cup were analyzed. The number of possessions and free-throw occurrences were recorded for both teams of every game by 2 independent observers. The Cohen`s Kappas were 0.92 and 0.9 for the intra- and inter-observer reliability, respectively. Data were analyzed separately for the preliminary and advanced rounds. Paired Sample t-test was used to compare the number of FTA between data recorded and in box-score published from FIBA. Linear regression was used to derive ? values from the recorded data and the independent t-test was used to compare the ? values. In addition, Wilcoxon Signed-rank Test was used to compare the recorded number of possessions with the estimated number of possessions based on the derived ? and the box score data. RESULTS: There were no significant differences for the number of FTA between recorded and box-score data for the preliminary and advanced rounds. The ? values of 0.47 and 0.45 were found for preliminary and advanced rounds with R2 higher than 0.96 for both groups and they were not significantly different (p=.22). No significant differences were observed for the number of possessions between the recorded data and the estimations based on the ? values and the box score data for the preliminary and advanced rounds. CONCLUSION: The ? values derived for the preliminary and advanced rounds of 2019 FIBA men`s world cup were higher than 0.44 of NBA derived value. Although the ? values of the two phases did not reach significant difference, there is a trend of higher ratio for less advanced level. We suggest that the ? value for estimating the number of possessions from the box score data should be empirically established for different levels of basketball games.
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