Attacking 7:6 in the German DKB Handball-Bundesliga: An empirical analysis

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Chapter 2, Literature Review:
[...] One phenomenon that can be observed quite often is that teams using the additional court player, mostly the 7th court player, try to go for the 1st wave when having the chance to go for a fast break, however, they opt not to go for a 2nd and 3rd wave or fast throw-off (Feldmann, 2016) in order to have time to include their additional player into the positional attack. As the rates of the extended fast breaks are still rather high (Bauer, 2016), the question arises if that is a reasonable choice (Riemschneider, 2018). Consequently, when playing without fast breaks or fast throw-offs, the chance of situational numerical advantages is lost, whereas a systematic numerical court player superiority in the positional attack is achieved.
Typical usage of the 7th court player includes
- man-marking of one player by the opposing defense. However, this often leads to the advantage for the offense, that the marked player has a shorter way to the bench to substitute
- offensive man-oriented defense formations (3:3, 1:5, man-to-man). Using a 7th court player leads to the consequence that man-orientation is not possible anymore and the often standard offensive defense formation is given up (Bauer, 2010; Burkowski, 2013)
- being behind on the scoreboard (Feldmann, 2016)
- immediately before the half-time break, as an opposing attack gets unlikely
- when having problems to score in general (Bachmann, 2014; Bauer, 2010; Burkowski, 2013)
- the last attacks of a game (when a goal is needed)
Often the release action is started from a standing position with tempo changes, as the defense does not pressurize the offense due to its rather defensive formation (Späte, 2016a), leading to higher demands in precision and timing of the attack, as less space is available in depth, but also less technical faults of the attack are present (Riemschneider, 2018) probably due to the reduced defense pressure.
In 6 against 6 with an additional

Dr. Julian Bauer studied Sports Sciences and English at the Universities of Duisburg-Essen, Malta, Wuppertal, Maastricht and Mallorca. After completing his PhD in training sciences, he worked as a coach at the NRW-Sports school in Düsseldorf and as a sport teacher.
Moreover he is a coach of the Handballverband Niederrhein. Since 2017 he is also a lecturer at the Institution of Sports- and Movement sciences at the University of Duisburg-Essen.
He is a member of the teaching staff of the Handballverband Niederrhein and the German Handball Association and worked as a speaker for different institutions such as the International Handball Federation, the District Government and the Chinese Handball Association.
Besides numerous publications e.g. for the journal of Handballtraining his main research interest focuses on sport specific training sciences, quantitative analysis methods and collective sports games teaching.