Evaluation of elite table tennis players' comprehensive technical and tactical performance.

Background: Game performance analysis has been playing a significant role in sports events which has reached an international consensus. In the field of technical and tactical analysis of table tennis, many studies conducted the segmented evaluation of players based on the phased-theory. The present study proposed the concepts of "competitive technical and tactical performance" of elite table tennis players. The purpose of this study was to develop an entropy-based weighting system integrated with three comprehensive evaluation methods, aiming to examine its feasibility for evaluation in two practical applications: inter-athlete comparison and performance fluctuations across time periods. Another purpose was to explore the applicability of different comprehensive evaluation methods through comparative application.

Methods: A total of 40 matches of six elite male table tennis players in 2019 were selected to evaluate their competitive technical and tactical performance. The technical effectiveness of four phases in a match as the relevant indexes, three comprehensive evaluation methods, including the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to an Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method, the Rank-sum ratio method and the Osculating value method were applied based on the Entropy weight method. Kendall's concordance coefficient and Spearman's correlation coefficient were employed to examine the consistency and correlation.

Results: (1) The technical strength ranking of the six elite table tennis players was as follows: Player A, Player B, Player C, Player F, Player E, and Player D. This ranking exhibited a high degree of consistency with the international rankings as of December 2019. Notably, Player C's performance showed significant fluctuations, whereas Player E demonstrated a steady and upward performance trend. (2) All Kendall's concordance coefficients exceeded 0.948, and all Spearman's correlation coefficients were above 0.883, with statistically highly significant results (p < 0.01).

Conclusions: All three comprehensive methods were shown to have strong applicability and high consistency in evaluating the comprehensive performance of athletes. The TOPSIS method performed more well. This approach facilitated a more in-depth and comprehensive representation of table tennis match analysis, providing practical applications for athletes and coaches.