Individual and team efficiency: a case of the National Hockey League

The paper aims at the evaluation of efficiency in sports. Many articles are dealing with the application of data envelopment analysis (DEA) models in this area. They are mainly oriented on efficiency evaluation of teams and not the individual players. On the contrary, the main aim of this paper is to combine both approaches and investigate the relation between individual efficiency of the players and the efficiency of the teams. The first step is the evaluation of individual efficiencies, and the second one is its aggregation into the teams' performance within a competition (League). The idea is to evaluate the efficiency of individual players in certain positions and explore how the individual efficiencies contribute to the efficiency of the teams. Individual efficiency is measured using traditional radial and slacks-based measure DEA models. Team efficiency is derived in several ways-traditional DEA models with the variables describing the true achievements of the teams, parallel DEA models that consider all positions and players, and actual results of the teams in the League, which is the true performance of the team. The study is based on the Canadian-American National Hockey League (NHL) statistics in 2019/2020. The results of the analysis are compared and discussed. They show that the true performance of the team is not always directly dependent on individual performances of the members of the team.