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.
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.
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".
This is because you're a novice. Directing your working memory to step-by-step instruction will improve your skill performance. However, once the skill becomes more of a motor program (you become an expert), directing working memory to step-by-step instruction will decrease performance.
http://hpl.uchicago.edu/Projects/Projects_1.html http://hpl.uchicago.edu/Projects/Projects_3.html
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.
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. :)
