Abstract
The long lasting debate initiated by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky in is revisited: does a “hot hand” phenomenon exist in sports? Hereby we come back to one of the cases analyzed by the original study, but with a much larger data set: all free throws taken during five regular seasons () of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Evidence supporting the existence of the “hot hand” phenomenon is provided. However, while statistical traces of this phenomenon are observed in the data, an open question still remains: are these non random patterns a result of “success breeds success” and “failure breeds failure” mechanisms or simply “better” and “worse” periods? Although free throws data is not adequate to answer this question in a definite way, we speculate based on it, that the latter is the dominant cause behind the appearance of the “hot hand” phenomenon in the data.
Highlights
Current information era, brings with it exciting opportunities for exploring old and new research fields using extensive data sets that are accessible nowadays
We study a large data set from the world of basketball: any person who ever watched a basketball match is likely to be familiar with terms like ‘‘hot hand’’, ‘‘on fire’’, ‘‘in the zone’’, ‘‘on a roll’’ etc
The data set used in our analysis after cleaning it for various items, is constructed of a total of 308862 free throw attempts consisting of 38441 single free throw attempts, 132917 pairs of free throw attempts taken by 712 different players and 1529 triplets of free throws attempts taken by 251 different players from a total 6150 games over 5 consecutive seasons
Summary
Brings with it exciting opportunities for exploring old and new research fields using extensive data sets that are accessible nowadays. We study a large data set from the world of basketball: any person who ever watched a basketball match is likely to be familiar with terms like ‘‘hot hand’’, ‘‘on fire’’, ‘‘in the zone’’, ‘‘on a roll’’ etc. The original motivation of their paper was to study how human subjects misperceive random sequences and tend to attribute nonrandom patterns to completely random data For that purpose they analyzed three types of data coming from the world of basketball. They claimed that the observed patterns could have been produced by random as well and the fact that people relate ‘‘temperature’’ inspired adjectives to players in different times is connected to the way human beings perceive the random world surrounding them and not to the objective features of reality. Since this provoking work many people have analyzed basketball and other sports looking for evidence of deviations from random patterns (see the reviews of [8], [9] and the website [10])
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