In basketball, timeouts stop the game, but not momentum
In basketball, the timeout is the coach’s most visible gesture. The game stops, the team huddles, and for a few seconds, it feels as if everything could change. It is the moment to try to interrupt momentum, to break a negative run, to restore order.
New research on the EuroLeague, however, invites a reconsideration of this expectation. Timeouts do work, but not in the way they are often imagined: they do not overturn games, but rather limit their deterioration.
In the minute before a timeout, teams experience an average deficit of 3.74 points; in the minute after, the gap shrinks to 1.20. The intervention therefore, has a positive and statistically significant effect, but not one strong enough to reverse the sign of the score. Moreover, this improvement remains confined to the short term and does not translate into better outcomes over the course of a season.
A classic question in sports analytics
The role of timeouts has long been at the center of the sports analytics debate. The question is simple: does interrupting play really make it possible to change a game’s momentum?
The available evidence, especially for the NBA, is mixed. Some studies suggest that timeouts can break opponents’ scoring runs; others, using more rigorous methodologies, find very limited or null effects. The issue is partly methodological: timeouts are called precisely when a team is struggling, making it difficult to disentangle cause and effect.
This study contributes to this literature with two specific elements. On the one hand, it analyzes the EuroLeague, a less explored context than the NBA and one that offers a methodological advantage: in the EuroLeague, only coaches can call timeouts, thereby focusing the analysis entirely on coaches’ behavior. On the other hand, it adopts empirical strategies designed to better isolate the causal effect of timeouts.
Before and after the timeout
The analysis is based on all EuroLeague regular-season games from the 2021–22 season to the 2023–24 season. The sample includes more than 4,300 timeouts. The study uses play-by-play data, which record every event in the game—such as shots, fouls, substitutions, or timeouts—as well as aggregated end-of-game statistics.
In more than 95 percent of cases, the timeout occurs when the team is experiencing a negative run, that is, a situation in which it continues to concede points without scoring. In this sense, the timeout appears primarily as a response to an already unfolding adverse situation.
To measure the immediate effect of timeouts, the researchers compare team performance in the minute before and the minute after the interruption. To avoid distortions related to the fact that timeouts are called at critical moments, they complement this measure with a second strategy, comparing the effect of timeouts with what happens in similar negative-run situations in which, however, a timeout cannot be called because the coach has no timeouts remaining.
After a timeout, the differential between points scored and conceded improves on average by about 2.5 points. However, it remains negative: the team continues to concede more than it scores. The timeout reduces the gap, but does not eliminate it.
The second part of the study instead looks at the longer term. Here, the researchers include a measure of timeout effectiveness in a standard model that explains wins through four fundamental factors of the game (shooting, turnovers, rebounds, free throws). A timeout is considered effective when it improves the scoring differential between the minute before and the minute after. However, the average number of “effective” timeouts per game, calculated for each team over the season, does not add any explanatory power to the model.
What matters are the fundamentals
In the short term, timeouts are useful: they slow negative runs, reduce the gap, and help contain difficulties. But their effect is limited and, above all, temporary. There is no evidence that timeouts, on average, can reverse the course of a game, nor that their effectiveness has any impact on overall season outcomes. Wins continue to depend on the fundamentals of the game, not on the management of interruptions.
Timeouts appear to work better when they are used to interrupt substantial negative runs, while the decisions made during them, such as substitutions, do not seem to amplify their effectiveness.
The temptation to interpret these findings in managerial terms—starting from the idea that performance is driven by structural drivers (the fundamentals) rather than tactical interventions—is strong, but any generalization will need to be supported by specific future research.
Carlo Favero, one of the co-authors of the study, is also the coach of the Pellicani, Bocconi University’s basketball team, and even before this study he was among the coaches least inclined to use timeouts.
One of his players, Francesco Infante, enrolled in the SDA Bocconi Master of Business Administration and the team’s center, played seven years in Italy’s Serie A2 and as many in Serie B before moving to Milan for the MBA. “It is interesting to know that timeouts are statistically not very effective,” he says, “and it helps us not to be overly impressed when opponents call one. But the level of a team’s experience can also make a difference. Reversing the momentum of an EuroLeague team with a timeout may be illusory, but with the youngest and least experienced teams among those in our division, the interregional Serie B, I suspect it may have a somewhat greater effect.” His coach might take this as a suggestion for the topic of a future paper.
Carta, G., Favero, C., & Maver, A. (2026). “Do timeouts matter? A study of EuroLeague basketball.” Journal of Sports Analytics, 12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/22150218261434693
