Is it a Fallacy to Believe in the Hot Hand in the NBA Three-Point Contest?

Abstract

The NBA Three-Point Contest has been considered an ideal setting to study the hot hand, as it showcases the elite professional shooters that hot hand beliefs are typically directed towards, but in an environment that eliminates many of the confounds present in game action. We collect 29 years of NBA Three-Point Contest television broadcast data (1986-2015), apply a statistical approach that improves on those of previous studies, and find considerable evidence of hot hand shooting in and across individuals. Our results support fans' and experts' widely held belief in the hot hand among NBA shooters.

A Cold Shower for the Hot Hand Fallacy: Robust Evidence that Belief in the Hot Hand is Justified

“…GVT's betting study on hot hand beliefs, which Gilovich has referred to as "...the most important bit of evidence against the hot hand," found that players are unable to successfully predict the shot outcomes of their teammates. 70 However, it has recently been shown that the statistical tests used in GVT's betting study are severely underpowered, and the effect sizes misinterpreted (Miller and Sanjurjo 2017). In fact, an improved re-analysis of their data yields strong evidence that players are skilled at predicting their teammates' shot outcomes (Miller and Sanjurjo 2017), which is consistent with the results on beliefs what we observe here.…”

“…Nevertheless, we find a hot hand effect across all extant controlled shooting studies. This evidence is consistent with the pooled hot hand effects observed in relatively less controlled environments such as the ("semi-controlled") NBA three point contest (Miller and Sanjurjo 2015), 69 NBA free throw shooting (Arkes 2010;Yaari and Eisenmann 2011), and NBA live ball shooting (Bocskocsky et al 2014).…”

“…69 The NBA three point contest is less controlled than a shooting experiment yet also has some of the same important features. For an analysis of 29 years of shootout data using the empirical approach introduced here see Miller and Sanjurjo (2015).…”

Hot hand or choking under pressure – Evidence from professional basketball

“…(3) as those for the NBA three-point contest (Miller & Sanjurjo, 2019) and NBA FT shooting (Arkes, 2010(Arkes, , 2013Lantis & Nesson, 2021;Mews & Ötting, 2021).…”

Alternation blindness in the representation of binary sequences.

“…According to this idea, people assume equal frequency of outcomes within a random sequence that fits into short-term memory (STM), and such sequences have a tendency to alternate too often. A recent account argues that biases of randomness reflect people’s limited perceptual experiences with the environment (Hahn & Warren, 2009; Miller & Sanjurjo, 2015).…”