The interaction of individual psychological crisis and time phases in basketball.

Strain in basketball competition can be structured temporally into three psychologically meaningful phases: a beginning, main, and endphase of each half-time. The relevance of these phases for the diagnosis of an individual psychological crisis during the competition is discussed. Empirical evidence is based on the results of a study conducted on 28 basketball experts, who were asked to assess the components of the Bayesian likelihood ratio (diagnosticity) for each phase, thereby evaluating the crisis-relevance of that phase. Analysis of variance shows the significant influences of the hypothesized crisis-noncrisis character, half-time (first-second) and phase (beginning, main, end) on the (considerable) diagnostic relevance of the time-phases. The authors briefly discuss the meaning of the present results.