Perception is everything. Whether it’s sports, life, or anything else, the way one perceives things changes his or her thought process. This is especially evident in basketball. Imagine that you’re huddled around your players preparing for a buzzer beater. You have a 55% shooter who has had an off-night, only shooting 1 for 10. On the other hand, you have a 35% shooter shooting an extremely well 8 for 11. Now, the last shot of the game: who do you give it to? Before we tackle that, suppose I tell you that I have a fair coin and an unfair coin that is twice as likely to give heads.
Here is a sampling of flips:
H H T T H T H T H H H H H
Would you say it was the fair coin or the unfair coin? If you said the fair coin, then congratulations, you may do well as a clutch-time basketball coach. Because there are twice as many heads up there, many people perceive the unfair coin as being displayed. However, it’s all part of the randomness of a fair coin.
Now, back to the basketball question.
Now, back to the basketball question.
For a little thought experiment, let’s run a simulation for a 70% basketball shooter. Through a little MATLAB magic, we can keep a running total of total shots made and second shots made. This simply simulates 1000 shots for a 70% shooter.
Unsurprisingly, we get a result of 298 shots made over 1000 for a percentage of 29.8%. Now, most interesting is the percentage of second shots made. This is 27.5%! Shockingly, the likelihood that the player will make his second shot after a successful first shot drops! Does this make you re-evaluate your clutch shooting decision?
Don’t just take this simple simulation’s word for it. There has been a ton of literature on the Hot Hand in basketball. Most importantly, John Huizinga – Yao Ming’s Agent and University of Chicago Economics Professor – has recently produced significantly convincing evidence against the Hot Hand. The researchers went through a total of 900,000 shots by 49 players. The player list includes Kobe Bryant, Dwayne Wade, Lebron James, and other equal members – a damn hot list. To get to the core of things, Sandy Weil, one of the authors of the paper, states, as quoted to an email for ESPN, “contrary to the existence of the hot hand, the 49 prolific shooters in our sample are less likely to make a shot after a made basket than after a miss. We found this effect stronger if the player made a jump shot on the previous shot than if they had made a non-jumper (mostly layups and dunks). The average of the players in our study shoots about 46.7% on a shot after missing his previous shot. But if he made a non-jumper, he’ll shoot around 45%. And after a made jump shot, he’ll shoot around 43.3%.”
Now, this gets interesting. After shifting through 900,000 shots, these highly respected researchers produced the same result as our thought experiment above: namely that the Hot Hand does not exist and that a player is actually less likely to make a subsequent shot!
Take this result to any schoolyard basketball player, and they will surely refute it. In fact, perhaps you yourself would even testify against it, recalling that one day in your youth when you could feel the focus and intensity to your core. Specifically why a player does worse on his second attempt could be because of many factors. Perhaps the defense tightens up on him, perhaps he simply gets arrogant and takes irresponsible shots, or perhaps it’s something else. That’s an analysis for another day. One thing’s for sure, if you as the coach draw up the play for the lackluster shooter and he misses, you will surely be criticized the next day. However, if you draw up the play for the hot shooter, there’s a higher chance that he will miss. What’s your call, coach?
