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Do Coaches In The National Basketball Association Actually Display Racial Bias? Replication And Extension, Gokhan Ertug, Massimo Maoret

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We replicate and extend empirical evidence that has been interpreted as an indication of coaches’ racial bias in the National Basketball Association (NBA) by Schroffel and Magee (2012) and Zhang (2017; 2019). After replicating the published results, we extend them by modeling coaches’ decisions of “resting the starters,” a common tactical decision based on players’ quality and not on their race, thus exploring whether this tactic may provide an alternative explanation for associations that might thus far have been taken to indicate racial bias. Our results show that, after empirically accounting for “resting the starters,” the magnitude of associations that …