

Hot and Heavy: About NBA Shooting - matt
http://myespn.go.com/blogs/truehoop/0-39-90/Hot-and-Heavy--About-NBA-Shooting.html

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adsyoung
These articles always bug me some what as they usually leave out the issue of
technique. There are certainly times when I start heaving the ball at the ring
with a lot less focus on technique and without taking the time to set my feet
correctly. When I get my act into gear and concentrate on it I'd bet there is
greater chance it's going in.

Now presumably this is less of an issue with professional players. I'm
guessing LeBron James is a lot more consistent in his technique than I am but
it seems like a major variable thats not really discussed.

The argument against the term "hot hand" seems to be against some silly naive
notion that the stars align and you are on a shooting streak greater than some
fixed probability would dictate.

But I've always thought of the term in the sense of the player shooting well
i.e. the player has good technique and shot selection tonight and has raised
their probability of the shot going in.

Which of course cannot be distinguished from anything else so I'm no doubt
mostly wrong as well but it annoys me it isn't properly mentioned that I've
seen.

~~~
adsyoung
Just to add to that, the other variable that I recognise as a player is your
feel for the weight of the ball at any given time or night. Sometimes it feels
like you're just guessing how hard to shoot and other times it feels like you
could throw anything up and you know you're going to get close.

I don't think people do a very good job and explaining why players object to
these studies.

Because rightly or wrongly the player feels like at different moments there
are different probabilities that they will make the shot based on all sorts of
things. It's not just a fixed probability you carry with you at all times.

Using season averaged statistics is useful and tells one story but it does not
tell this story because it can't be measured. That's why to a player it feels
completely wrong IMHO.

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swillden
_Because rightly or wrongly the player feels like at different moments there
are different probabilities that they will make the shot based on all sorts of
things._

That is certainly true... but does the player's feeling have anything to do
with the actual probability that the ball will go into the hole? According to
the Cornell study mentioned by the article, the answer is generally "no".

~~~
adsyoung
Maybe not a great deal but there is something going on there. Discussing
basketball in terms of coin flips which takes skill and technique out of the
equation is definetely missing something key or so it would seem to the
player. If you can prove that statistically it doesn't matter then so be it.

~~~
davi
Probably no one is ever going to see this, but a cool idea just occurred to
me: what if your ability to _attend_ is stochastic?

I play basketball too, and have had 'hot' nights and crummy nights -- and
subjectively, on the few really good nights I've had, I _knew_ when shots are
going to go in, and when they were going to miss, and I _knew_ , much more
clearly than normal, where the hoop was and how to get the ball there. This
did not feel like post-hoc rationalization of a successful basket. I was
predicting accurately which shots would hit, and which would miss, before the
ball when in.

Yet, analyzing players' performance, their streaks are indistinguishable from
what would be expected statistically.

The explanation that reconciles both set of observations is that the ability
to attend to salient data (weight of ball, position of feet, etc.) is itself a
random process.

Note also that this attention may not be conscious: your motor control
circuitry is doing huge amounts of processing that you're not at all aware of
during a game.

~~~
adsyoung
Yeah doing some more thought on the issue I reached the same conclusion. It
would be great if someone could prove that I am consistent enough in what I
can control and my body is also producing a roughly consistent random factor
on top of that. If so, this would make the relationship to a coin flip a lot
more sensible.

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biotech
These articles are fun to read for those hackers that are also basketball
fans. That being said, I don't entirely agree with the author's reasoning.
E.g., the author mentions reasons why a player is more likely to miss a shot
after making one, but fails to go through a real analysis of "hotness".

Making one shot does not qualify a player as being hot by any definition that
I've ever heard. So, what are the stats after making 2, 3, 4 shots? Does the
likelihood of making the next shot rise after making several shots in a row?
There are several other questions I would ask that would be more convincing to
prove or disprove the effect of being hot.

Some of the comments below the article have interesting criticisms.

~~~
sjs382
I've really enjoyed all of this recent coverage about the MIT Sloan Sports
Analytics Conference. If you're looking for more, Bill Simmons does a pretty
good job discussing this. And if you see anything else, please submit to HN.
:)

I submitted <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515342> a while ago and got
no love. I was sad that no one here had an interest in sports, but it turns
out I was wrong. :)

Lately, too, I've been thinking how a lot of this could be applied to the NHL.
:)

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matt
More details on the research here:
[http://web.me.com/sandy1729/sportsmetricians_consulting/Hot_...](http://web.me.com/sandy1729/sportsmetricians_consulting/Hot_Hand_files/HH_Draft_v04.pdf)

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erlanger
Ugh, don't remind me. I was Ray Allen today, and not in the good way.

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sachinag
Hahahaha - I love the last remnants of the old Go.com network of Disney sites.
(BTW, this is from Henry Abbott's TrueHoop blog, which was bought by ESPN.
It's a very good read about debunking a commonly-held belief about basketball
shooting with _facts_.)

