Calculation Method of Winning Percentage in Handball Games and its Application to Player Evaluation

The evaluation of athletes is directly related to the management of sports teams, team organization, and the motivation of the athletes themselves, and is considered to be very important. In Japan, professional sports such as baseball and soccer use data-based player evaluation methods and strategies, but in handball, many teams evaluate, select, and direct their players based on traditional knowledge and past experience. Sabermetrics is a method of analysis in baseball. Since baseball plays are separated by each pitch and the open data of handball is play-by-play data, we considered that it has a high affinity with sabermetrics. In this study, we apply the sabermetric index. Specifically, we propose an evaluation index that focuses on players who increase the probability of winning a game by using their play-by-play data. In the field of handball, there have been few studies based on data concerning player evaluation as far as the authors have investigated.