ABSTRACT
Brancazio (1981) published a detailed and wide ranging paper covering the physics of differing aspects of basketball. Much of the game involves bouncing the ball off the ground, and Brancazio dealt with this in much the same manner as in Section 4.4.4, Case 2 Page 62 (the non-skidding case). However, he only deals with the ball’s velocity component parallel to the court, so that the coefficient of restitution, e, is assumed to be equal to 1. He focuses on the kinetic energy changes on impact with the court and derives the formulas delineated in Table 15.1 for the translational, rotational and combined kinetic energy changes for balls possessing, initially: no spin, forward spin and backward spin (where v0 is the initial horizontal velocity, ω0 is the initial spin with topspin being positive, and all other symbols have their usual meaning).
