Measuring team resilience: Developing a resilience Index based on stressors in professional basketball

Abstract

Resilience has emerged as a pivotal construct in understanding performance sustainability under pressure in professional sport. This study introduces and validates the Team Resilience Index, a novel quantitative tool designed to assess the resilient behavior of professional basketball teams across an entire season, based on competition-derived stressors. Using public data from the Spanish ACB League, the Team Resilience Index was constructed by identifying and quantifying seven key stressors from the literature, experienced by each team and analysing performance outcomes relative to those stressors. Two versions of the index were tested and validated using correlations coefficients and multiple linear regressions. The findings demonstrate that Team Resilience Index offers a reliable and interpretable measure of team resilience, correlating strongly with end-of-season performance and influenced by external benchmarks. This research contributes a practical, competition-based methodology to the resilience literature, providing coaches, analysts, and researchers with a robust framework for monitoring team adaptation throughout professional sport seasons.