The development of evidence-based eligibility systems in basketball for athletes with intellectual impairment (II) requires investigating the influence of II on performance. Due to this, the present study aimed to compare game-related statistics from II and able-bodied (AB) competitions.
The World Men II-Basketball Championship 2013 (n=13 games and 63 players) and the Spanish Men AB-Basketball Championships 2014 under 16- years-old (n=10 games and 95 players) and under 18-years-old (n=18 games and 175 players) were analyzed. Team and individual statistics were normalized to 100 ball possessions and to 40 minutes played respectively. One-way ANOVA and post hoc Tukey tests were conducted to compare II and AB-teams.
Also, a discriminant analysis was employed to identify which variables discriminated them best. The Kruskal-Wallis and U Mann-Whitney tests were applied to compare the II and AB individual game-related statistics. II-teams played more ball possessions per game (p<0.05) and the variables which best discriminated II and AB-teams were: 2-point unsuccessful shots ¦SC=-0.384¦, 3-point successful ¦SC=0.456¦, 3-point unsuccessful ¦SC=-0.399¦, free-throws successful ¦SC=0.319¦ and fouls ¦SC=0.454¦.
In all playing positions II-players presented more 2-point unsuccessful and lower shooting percentage in all kind of shots. II-guards attempted more field shots and made more turnovers than their peers, showing an unbalanced roles´ distribution compared with AB-players. These results confirmed that II and AB-players perform basketball in different ways.