{"id":779,"date":"2006-11-02T09:36:05","date_gmt":"2006-11-02T09:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/02\/in-the-zone\/"},"modified":"2006-11-02T09:36:05","modified_gmt":"2006-11-02T09:36:05","slug":"in-the-zone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/11\/02\/in-the-zone\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"

While I know that there’s no great love for basketball in these parts, I can’t let Jonah Lehrer’s post on the “Hot Hand”<\/a> go without comment. It’s about a paper analyzing the statistics of jump shooting, which finds that contrary to popular belief among basketball players, they don’t really get “hot” in a statistically significant way. In fact, in some cases, they found the opposite:<\/p>\n

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The 76ers were shocked by the evidence. Andrew Toney, the shooting guard, was particularly hard to convince: he was sure that he was a streaky shooter, and went through distinct “hot” and “cold” periods. But the numbers told a different story. During the regular season, Tooney made 46 percent of all of his shots. After hitting three shots in a row–a sure sign that he was now “in the zone”–Tooney’s field goal percentage dropped to 34 percent. (Ironically, when Tooney thought he was “hot” he was actually more likely to miss a shot.) The opposite phenomenon was also true: after missing three shots in a row, Tooney made 52 percent of his shots, which was significantly higher than his normal average.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Of course, this should make perfect sense to anyone who plays the game. When you get “hot,” you feel like anything you throw up will go in, and you start taking shots that you wouldn’t otherwise. I had a stretch earlier this fall where I was shooting about 75% while drifting out of bounds on the right-side baseline. Once I noticed that, I threw up some awful crap from that area, and quickly beat that percentage down…<\/p>\n

On the other hand, when you get “cold,” you’re less likely to shoot anything other than a wide open lay-up. It’s one of my standard rules for pick-up games– if the first few shots don’t drop, just rebound and play defense, and let somebody else shoot. <\/p>\n

I haven’t looked at the actual paper yet, but I may check it out, because I’m curious to see what if anything they did about the influence of defense. After all, shooting in a basketball game isn’t actually a random process– the players on the other team are actively trying to stop you from scoring, and you might reasonably expect the defense to have a significant influence on the shooting percentage.<\/p>\n

Oh, wait. Their data were from the 1985 NBA season. Never mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I know that there’s no great love for basketball in these parts, I can’t let Jonah Lehrer’s post on the “Hot Hand” go without comment. It’s about a paper analyzing the statistics of jump shooting, which finds that contrary to popular belief among basketball players, they don’t really get “hot” in a statistically significant… Continue reading In the Zone<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}