Lassoing the momentum in professional basketball games

This paper extract valuable sports factors to quantify the momentum phenomenon in a basketball game. We record the momentum happened in the scoring process between the home and away teams in each game based on slope and time, and use elastic-net to extract factors that affecting the momentum values. There are three contributions in this paper. First, it is found that timeout, rebound, score, foul and turnover can significantly affect the strength of momentum. Second, in the analysis of the influential factors of momentum, it is found that when slope as the momentum, there is a clear home advantage, while the home advantage does not stand out when time as the momentum. Third, momentum can significantly affect the winning percentage of the game, so factors can be used to predict the outcome of the game in the future.