Hot and Heavy: About NBA Shooting | Hacker News Reader

Hot and Heavy: About NBA Shooting

myespn.go.com

13 pointsmatt13 comments

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.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

>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.

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

I've been playing 2-3 times a week for 18 years at a high grade. I have no doubt its much less of a variable in the NBA but I am suggesting it is a variable that rarely gets mentioned in that there a number of definitions people could take for the term "hot hand" and ways it could be discussed. No one is the perfect robot.

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.

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. :)

More details on the research here: http://web.me.com/sandy1729/sportsmetricians_consulting/Hot_...

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

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.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com