  In the summer of 2017, the National Basketball Association reduced the number
of total timeouts, along with other rule changes, to regulate the flow of the
game. With these rule changes, it becomes increasingly important for coaches to
effectively manage their timeouts. Understanding the utility of a timeout under
various game scenarios, e.g., during an opposing team's run, is of the utmost
importance. There are two schools of thought when the opposition is on a run:
(1) call a timeout and allow your team to rest and regroup, or (2) save a
timeout and hope your team can make corrections during play. This paper
investigates the credence of these tenets using the Rubin causal model
framework to quantify the causal effect of a timeout in the presence of an
opposing team's run. Too often overlooked, we carefully consider the stable
unit-treatment-value assumption (SUTVA) in this context and use SUTVA to
motivate our definition of units. To measure the effect of a timeout, we
introduce a novel, interpretable outcome based on the score difference to
describe broad changes in the scoring dynamics. This outcome is well-suited for
situations where the quantity of interest fluctuates frequently, a commonality
in many sports analytics applications. We conclude from our analysis that while
comebacks frequently occur after a run, it is slightly disadvantageous to call
a timeout during a run by the opposing team and further demonstrate that the
magnitude of this effect varies by franchise.
