Abstract
The hot-hand phenomenon, according to which a player’s performance is significantly elevated during certain phases relative to the expected performance based on the player’s base rate, has left many researchers and fans in basketball puzzled: The vast majority of players, coaches and fans believe in its existence but statistical evidence supporting this belief has been scarce. It has frequently been argued that the hot hand in basketball is unobservable because of strategic adjustments and defensive interference of the opposing team. We use a dataset with novel metrics, such as the number of defenders and the defensive intensity for each shot attempt, which enable us to directly measure defensive pressure. First, we examine how the shooting percentage of NBA players changes relative to the attributes of each metric. We find that it is of lesser importance by how many defenders a player is guarded but that defensive intensity, e.g., whether a defender raises his hand when his opponent shoots, has a larger impact on shot difficulty. Second, we explore how the underlying metrics and shooting accuracy change as a function of streak length. Our results indicate that defensive pressure and shot difficulty increase (decrease) during hot (cold) streaks, so that defenders seem to behave according to the hot-hand belief and try to force hot players into more difficult shots. However, we find that shooting percentages of presumably hot players do not increase and that shooting performance is not related to streakiness, so that the defenders’ hot-hand behavior cannot be considered ecologically rational. Therefore, we are unable to find evidence in favor of the hot-hand effect even when accounting for defensive pressure.
Highlights
The hot-hand phenomenon in sports has sparked many debates about discrepancies between perception and reality
The goal of the current work is to answer two research questions: (1) How does the field goal percentage (FG%) of NBA players change based on the attributes of each variable, e.g., whether a player is guarded by one, two or three defenders? (2) How do these metrics change in relation to streakiness and how do they affect the FG% during hot and cold streaks?
The current work presented a multitude of novel performance metrics in the light of the hot-hand phenomenon and directly examined the impact of defensive pressure on the hot hand for the first time
Summary
The hot-hand phenomenon in sports has sparked many debates about discrepancies between perception and reality. Players and fans believe in the hot hand, according to which a player’s performance is expected to be elevated following three or more consecutive hits, but convincing empirical evidence which statistically supports this belief has been sparse until recently (for an overview, see Bar-Eli, Avugos, & Raab [1]). Most studies examining the hot-hand effect in basketball have made a crucial simplifying assumption by excluding the effect of defensive pressure. While the potential importance of defense with respect to the hot hand has been acknowledged frequently, traditional statistics, i.e., box score and play-by-play data, in basketball have not provided any metrics which could directly measure the impact of defensive pressure. We make use of a dataset which includes several novel defensive metrics, such as the number of defenders guarding a shot and the defensive intensity, and provide a new perspective on how defensive pressure may affect the hot hand. The goal of the current work is to answer two research questions: (1) How does the field goal percentage (FG%) of NBA players change based on the attributes of each variable, e.g., whether a player is guarded by one, two or three defenders? (2) How do these metrics change in relation to streakiness and how do they affect the FG% during hot and cold streaks?
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