Basketball and Philosophy: Thinking Outside the Paint

The Hot Hand in Basketball

THE HOT HAND IN BASKETBALL Steven D. Hales ANY BASKETBALL FAN or weekend warrior knows what it means to have a hot hand. It’s the feeling that you are in the groove, that you can’t miss your shots, that everything you do is the right thing. “If only I could play like that all the time, I’d be starting for the Lakers,” we lament. The pros feel the same way. Purvis Short, of the Golden State Warriors, has said, “You’re in a world all your own. It’s hard to describe. But the basket seems to be so wide. No matter what you do, you know the ball is going to go in.”1 Dean Oliver, a statistician on the staff of the Seattle Supersonics , writes: “In the first round of the NCAA Tournament a few years ago, I began to sense my own hot streak. Every shot seemed to hit the mark. Every pass of mine was converted and returned later. The game felt completely natural.”2 Familiar territory, right? Well, maybe not. Some psychologists and statisticians have recently argued for a very surprising thesis: despite nearly universal beliefs to the contrary, there is no such thing as streak runs of success in basketball; no one has ever been on a roll or had hot hands. According to the late Harvard scientist Stephen J. Gould, “Everybody knows about hot hands. The problem is that no such phenomenon exists.”3 Psychologists Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky write, “probably . . . most players, spectators, and students of the game believe in the hot hand, although our statistical analyses provide no evidence to support this belief .”4 Psychologist Robert M. Adams concurs: “Even though virtually any basketball player, fan, or commentator would scoff at the notion that the ‘hot hand’ is only an illusion, the present data confirm that.”5 Illusion or Reality? 197 The Hot Hand in Basketball Before taking a look at the reasoning behind these claims, we would do well to ask why a philosopher should have anything to say about the matter. One of the most ancient philosophical specialties is epistemology —the theory of knowledge—and one of the core epistemological issues is skepticism. Do we in fact know the things we all think we know? Skeptics argue that, for one reason or another, the answer is no. Hot hands deniers are a sort of epistemological skeptic; they maintain that in fact we don’t know something we all think we do. We don’t know that basketball players have hot hands despite widespread beliefs to the contrary. In this chapter I will defend the view that there are hot hands in basketball, that they are ubiquitous, and that players and observers are often right in identifying them. The skeptics do have a point worth considering, but they misunderstand the force of their own reasoning. The Success Doesn’t Breed Success Argument Stephen J. Gould writes, “We believe in ‘hot hands’ because we must impart meaning to a pattern—and we like meanings that tell stories about heroism, valor, and excellence, . . . and we have no feel for the frequency and length of sequences in random data.”6 While this may be true at some deep level, it is certainly not the reason sports participants give for the reality of hot hands. Anyone who has ever played a sport will cite internal, felt experience in favor of hot hand phenomena. When you are hot, it feels like you can’t miss, that every shot is just an easy layup. When you’re cold, it feels like no matter what you do, no matter how much you concentrate, every shot you take is a brick. A plausible way of expressing these attitudes is that a player has a better chance of making a shot after having just made his last two or three shots than he does after having missed his last two or three shots. Ninety-one out of one hundred basketball fans polled believe this statement; that is, they believe that success breeds success. The success-breeds-success idea is the driving force in the first argument against hot hands, an argument endorsed by all the skeptics. Call this the Success Doesn’t Breed Success Argument: 1. Someone has a hot hand only if he or she is performing in such a way that success breeds success. 198 Steven D. Hales...