The following essay is available for re-publication in The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
March Madness is here, and basketball fans are making predictions: Who will be the Cinderella story of the college tournament? Which teams will make it to the Final Four? Which player is going to carry their team to a title?
To say a player is hot or has hot hands means the player is making a lot of shots. The question of whether players on these streaks can defy random chance or if hot hands are just an illusion has been nagging researchers, coaches and fans for years.
Two researchers are studying operations and decision technologies. We looked at whether players can get hot in live-game situations. Some players make more shots than expected when they make two shots in a row. When we looked at all the players, we found that when a player makes more shots than normal, they are more likely to miss the next one. Hot hands are rare.
The players who get hot are a force to be reckoned with on the basketball court.
Fans have always believed in the ability of players to go on a hot streak, as shown in video games like NBA Jam, where the virtual ball would catch fire if a player made multiple shots in a row. A 1985 study concluded that what people perceive as hot hands is nothing more than the human brain's tendency to misunderstand chance and averages.
The original study and the later ones based on it suffered from small but significant selection bias, which threw off the statistical calculations. The math was thrown off by the way the team chose which shots to look at. The hot hand turned out to be real when researchers accounted for the bias.
The majority of studies on hot streaks in basketball focus on free throws, three-point contests and controlled field experiments. We wanted to use data from the NBA seasons to test the theory. In actual game situations, shots are not the same. We created a model that predicts how often a shot will go in based on a number of different factors. The distance from the basket, the type of shot, the distance from the closest defender, whether the shot was assisted, and other considerations were included. Thanks to the data-driven era of sports, we were able to do such an analysis.
We were able to model any shot by flipping a coin that represented the probability of a particular shot going in. The hot hand effect can be quantified by comparing the real world field goal percentage of a player after they are on a streak with the expected percentage obtained through simulations.
In the real world, a player made 45% of their shots after making two shots. He would hit 42% of the shots after making the two shots before. If the difference between the model prediction and the real world is significant over time, it is good evidence that the player can get hot and go on streaks.
The players who took at least 1,000 shots during the two NBA seasons were analyzed. We looked at shots taken after two, three and four times.
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When we looked at the shots from all the qualified players, we found that if a person made the two shots prior, their chance of making the next shot was lower than the model predicted.
The hot hand emerged for a large group of players when we looked at them individually. 30 players exhibited a statistically significant higher field goal percentage on a shot after two makes compared to their expected field goal percentage. The average hot hand effect increased the chance of making a third shot in a row by 2.71% for players who demonstrated the ability to go on hot streaks.
The hot hand effect was higher for streaks of three and four consecutive made shots.
It is important to note that having a hot hand does not mean that a player can suddenly make baskets from anywhere on the court. Tim Duncan, Roy Hibbert, and Marcin Gortat all have the ability to go on hot streaks, but they are not centers who take shots far from the basket. Their hot hands made them shoot more close-range shots. The explore and exploit approach refers to a short period of exploring different approaches to solve a problem followed by a period of exploiting the best approach found. This would look like a player finding a mismatch during a game and exploiting it by taking more of a certain type of shot. The explore and exploit approach has been linked to streaks of success in artistic and scientific careers.
The hypothesis is plausible, but it may not be the only factor accounting for hot streaks. The ability of a player's brain to quickly adapt to conditions in a game could be a cause. What about mental preparation? Our study supports the existence of hot hands. For coaches and players in the NBA or in this year's NCAA March Madness, it might be a good strategy to go with the hot hand.
The Conversation published this article. The original article is worth a read.
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