Wright stressed that he wasn’t “panicking or anything like that,” and his remedies seemed sensible, especially given the range of cures that exist for slumping baseball players. Other batters have changed their diet, burned articles of clothing, and consulted team chaplains after a few hitless games. It is former Chicago Cub Mark Grace who’s generally credited with coining the term slump-buster to describe a promiscuous, unattractive woman whom a struggling player “romances” in hopes of reversing his luck at the plate. Fans of the movie Major League will remember that the Pedro Cerrano character sought to extricate himself from a slump by sacrificing a chicken.
Still, Wright’s slump—the perception of it, anyway—took on an aura of its own in the Mets’ clubhouse. “Soon enough David will start hitting like everyone knows he can,” said Jeff Francoeur, then the team’s right fielder, who was batting over .300 at the time, 30 points higher than his career average. “Right now, until David gets going a little bit, the rest of us need to pick up the slack.”
You might say that the Mets needed Wright to channel his inner Vinnie Johnson. Basketball fans will recall Johnson as the almost sphere-shaped sixth man from the Detroit Pistons’ “Bad Boy” teams of the late 1980s and early 1990s. A shooting guard, Johnson probably was best known for his play in game five of the 1990 NBA finals. With the Pistons leading the series 3–1, the game tied, and 00.7 seconds on the clock, Johnson popped a 15-foot jumper to give Detroit the championship. A teammate suggested that Johnson be called 007, a nod to the time remaining when he hit his winning shot as well as to James Bond’s sharpshooting.
The nickname didn’t stick, though, mostly because Johnson already answered to one of the all-time great handles in sports. He was, of course, “the Microwave.” The nickname was conceived by Danny Ainge of the rival Boston Celtics, who, like so many, marveled at Johnson’s ability “to get hot in a hurry.” Johnson was a classic streak shooter—a “rhythm guy,” as they say in NBA-speak—capable of both spectacular and spectacularly bad marksmanship. Like all athletes, he endured slumps. But it seemed that once he dialed in his shot, his awkwardly released jumper found the bottom of the net with brutal accuracy. “When he came in and hit his first shot, everyone knew: Look out,” Chuck Daly, the late coach of the Bad Boys, once said. “I’ve never seen a player who used momentum the way Vinnie did.”
Momentum is such a vital component of sports that it’s taken on the qualities of a tangible object. Teams and athletes have it. They own it. They ride it. They take it into halftime, into the series, into the postseason. They try like hell not to give it back or lose it. A slumping player like David Wright needs to get his momentum back—and he did, by the way, boosting his season average to .314 by the time he played in the 2010 All-Star Game. A player like Vinnie the Microwave Johnson was thought to use momentum so effectively that it came to characterize his 14-year career.
But what if we told you that momentum doesn’t exist in sports?
First, let’s be clear. Indisputably, streaks occur in sports. In any league, in any sport, and at any level, teams and athletes perform well and perform poorly, sometimes for significant stretches of time. As of this writing, the Pittsburgh Pirates haven’t had a winning baseball season since 1992. That is a dismal run of consecutive sub-.500 seasons; in fact, it’s the longest in the history of major American team sports. When LeBron James left Cleveland in the summer of 2010, we were told (and told and told) that no local team had won a championship since 1964. On a more successful note, at this writing, the girls’ tennis team at Walton High School outside Atlanta hasn’t lost since 2004, a run of 133 straight matches. Speaking of tennis, Roger Federer has won at least one Major tennis championship every year since 2003. All of these are streaks, no doubt about it.
The real question is whether those streaks predict future performance. If you make your last few field goals or putts or send fastballs over the outfield fence, is your next attempt more likely to be successful? Does the team or player currently “riding the wave” fare better or worse in the next game than one who is not? Does recent performance directly influence immediate future performance? Or are streaks nothing more than random chance, the outcome of luck, predictive of nothing?
As the minor legend of Vinnie Johnson suggests, momentum is probably cited most often in the NBA. Some players, we’re told, cultivate a hot hand, and others cool off. Teams, we’re told, carry momentum and come into a game “on a roll.” This isn’t a new observation. Professors of psychology and behavioral economics Thomas Gilovich and Robert Vallone, then from Cornell, and the late Amos Tversky from Stanford studied basketball momentum and the hot hand phenomenon a generation ago. They followed the field goal attempts of nine Philadelphia 76ers during the 1980–1981 season and found no evidence of momentum. Field goal success, they reckoned, is largely independent of past success on recent attempts. Successful shot making—or missing—had no bearing on a player’s next attempt.
Of course, field goal success may be affected by what the defense is doing. A player who has hit several shots in a row may be guarded more vigilantly, which might make his success rate on the next attempt lower. Likewise, a player who has missed his recent shots might face a more lax defense, which could mean a greater likelihood of success on his next attempt. To avoid these potential distortions of a hot or cold hand, the professors also looked at free throw shooting, which involves no defense or adjustments. Their subjects were nine players from the Boston Celtics during the 1980–1981 and 1981–1982 seasons. Again they found no momentum or evidence of a hot hand. What players did on their previous free throws didn’t affect what they did on the next free throw.
The psychologists then looked across games and saw that being “hot” or “cold” one night did not predict performance the next night. It wasn’t necessarily that players who were “unconscious” one game automatically “came back to earth” the next game or that players who’d lost their touch in one game necessarily regained it the next night. Rather, there was simply no evidence that the streaks had any carryover effect; they simply were not predictive of future performance.
In addition to looking at NBA players, the researchers conducted an experiment using the varsity basketball players of the men’s and women’s teams at Cornell. They had the players shoot successive free throws and field goals from the exact same spot on the floor, facing no defensive, crowd, or game pressure. Once again, they found no evidence of the hot hand effect. Players who hit several shots or free throws in a row were no more likely to hit the next shot than were players who had missed several shots in a row.
Here’s the interesting part. The players themselves—both in the NBA and at Cornell—firmly believed in the hot hand effect. They felt hot or cold, as though the result of the previous shot would go a long way toward determining the result of the next one. Considering how often coaches instruct their players to “feed the hot hand,” it’s clear that many of them believe in the phenomenon of momentum. And as fans, most of us do, too. Before the professors began looking at basketball players’ stats, they surveyed fans and found that 91 percent agreed 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 just missed his last two or three shots.” In fact, the fans estimated that his chances were 20 percent greater if he had just made his last two or three shots. Even for free throws, 68 percent of the surveyed fans agreed that a player has “a better chance of making his second shot after making his first shot than after missing his first shot.” A full 84 percent of fans believed that “it is important to pass the ball to someone who has just made several shots in a row.”
Because the researchers’ data was so thoroughly at odds with perceptions in the sports world, they and other researchers refined the study further. Maybe shots taken within one minute of each other would exhibit more persistence. But that didn’t turn out to be the case. They tried replicating their findings using more data on more players over more seas
ons. Still, the results remained unchanged. Others looked at the results of the Three-Point Shootout held during the NBA’s All-Star Weekend, in which the most accurate shooters on the planet—absent defense, in a controlled environment—compete in a straightforward contest. Again, as often as announcers declared, “He’s on fire!” there was no evidence of momentum.
There was one academic study that, initially anyway, did find evidence of a hot hand. Irony of ironies, the results were driven largely by … the shooting of Vinnie Johnson. The key piece of supporting evidence, though, was the Microwave’s run of seven consecutive baskets in the fifth game of the 1988 NBA finals. Unfortunately, that seven-out-of-seven streak never happened. The data had been miscoded. (He missed his fourth shot, though a teammate tipped in the miss.) Once the data were corrected, Johnson—again, the player most notorious for shooting in spurts—was shown to be no more or less streaky than any other player, no more or less likely to make a shot after a hit as he was after a miss. But the researchers did show that Johnson and his teammates thought he was a streak shooter. He tended to shoot more after making a basket and was fed the ball more frequently after each make. The problem was, he wasn’t more likely to score.
More recently, John Huizinga and Sandy Weil, who also investigated the value of blocked shots (see “The Value of a Blocked Shot”), updated the hot hand study by looking at all NBA games between 2002 and 2008. They, too, found no evidence of any hot hand effect. However, they did find something else. Despite there being no greater likelihood of accuracy, shooters making their last several attempts act as if a hot hand exists. After making a shot, they take harder shots—and shoot about 3.5 percentage points below their normal field goal percentage. They also shoot 16 percent sooner than they do after a missed jump shot and are almost 10 percent more likely to take their team’s next shot if they made their last shot than if they missed it. (Both of these effects are much stronger for point guards and swingmen, which stands to reason: No one talks about a “hot hand” in conjunction with dunks, layups, and other short-range shots.) The authors concluded that if everyone on the team behaved this way—shooting more frequently and taking more difficult shots after a previous make than after a previous miss—it could ultimately cost a team 4.5 wins per season on average.
Okay, so momentum doesn’t exist on the level of the individual, but what about at the team level? Does momentum exist for NBA teams? We considered about 3,500 NBA games between 2005 and 2009, examining the play-by-play data and paying special attention to scoring runs. One can define scoring runs in any number of ways; we chose to look at teams that scored at least six unanswered points in the previous minute and called them hot (or their opponents cold). We then asked what happens over the next minute in those games. Did the hot team continue to remain hot by increasing its lead (or decreasing its deficit) against the cold team?
In a word, no. In fact, we found the opposite. If a team scores six or more unanswered points in the previous minute, it will on average be outscored by its opponent (by 0.31 points) over the next minute. This implies that there isn’t merely an absence of momentum; there is a reversal. A team that gets hot is more likely to do worse, not better.
But perhaps a minute was too short a time frame to consider momentum, so we looked over the next two, five, and ten minutes. But we found the same effect: reversals of fortune, not evidence of momentum. The following chart sums up our results.
WITHIN-GAME MOMENTUM IN THE NBA: POINT DIFFERENTIAL OF “HOT” TEAM OVER SUBSEQUENT MINUTES
In every instance—no matter how far back we defined hot or cold teams and how far forward we looked—we found strong evidence of reversals rather than momentum. Hot teams tend to get outscored after going on a run; cold teams tend to catch up. When he hosted ESPN’s SportsCenter, Steve Levy had a catch-phrase: “It’s the NBA; everyone makes a run.” Turns out, he was absolutely right.
This, of course, could be for a variety of reasons. Maybe streaking teams expend more energy when they make a run and then get fatigued. Perhaps after a big run coaches are more likely to send in inferior bench players. Or perhaps players exert less effort after they’ve built a comfortable lead, or opponents exert more effort when behind. Whatever the reason for the reversals, the evidence supporting momentum is simply not there.
Next, we looked at comebacks. A team is down by, say, ten points in the waning minutes of a game and stages a furious comeback to tie the game and send it into overtime. Does that team have a better chance of winning in OT? The answer, we’ve found, is no. Its chance of winning in overtime is no different from that of the team that gave up the lead (or, for that matter, than it is for two teams that were neck and neck the entire game before heading to OT). We found no evidence that teams that are on winning streaks of two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, or even ten games have any better chance of winning the next game. (The same is true for teams on long losing streaks.)
Even the postseason seems immune to momentum. Often we hear how important it is that teams get hot or sustain momentum going into the playoffs. We find no evidence for that. Controlling for a team’s overall regular season record, we find that a team entering the playoffs on a winning streak—even as much as ten games—does no better than a team entering the postseason on a losing streak. (Sure enough, as we were studying the data, the Boston Celtics were marching to the 2010 NBA finals, having lost seven of their last ten regular season games. Their opponents, the Lakers, had lost six of their nine final regular season games.)
Nor is the absence of momentum unique to the NBA. In baseball, hitting streaks seem to be no more predictive of future success than slumps are. Batting averages of players are just as likely to be higher after cold streaks as they are after hot streaks. The same thing goes for pitchers. We found no evidence that starters get into “a groove” that enables us to predict future success. Researchers have found the existence of momentum in two niche sports, bowling and billiards, but those sports (games, really) rely on a repetitive motion and take place in the same physical space. That’s a lot different from sinking jump shots in the face of a defense or hitting 95-mph fastballs.
Why do we attribute so much importance to “sports momentum” when it’s mostly fiction? Psychology offers an explanation. People tend to ascribe patterns to events. We don’t like mystery. We want to be able to explain what we’re seeing. Randomness and luck resist explanation. We’re uneasy concluding that “stuff happens” even when it might be the best explanation.
What’s more, many of us don’t have a firm grasp of the laws of chance. A classic example: On the first day of class, a math professor asks his students to go home, flip a coin 200 times, and record the sequence of heads and tails. He then warns, “Don’t fake the data, because I’ll know.” Invariably some students choose to fake flipping the coin and make up the results. The professor then amazes the class by identifying the fakers. How? Because those faking the data will record lots of alternations between heads and tails and include no long streaks of one or the other in the erroneous belief that this looks “more random.” Their sequence will resemble this: HTHTHHTHTTHTHT.
But in a truly random sequence of 200 coin tosses, a run of six or seven straight heads or tails is extremely likely: HTTTTTHHTTTHHHHHH.
Counterintuitive? Most of us think the probability of getting six heads or tails in a row is really remote. That’s true if we flip the coin only 6 times, but it’s not true if we flip it 200 times. The chances of flipping 10 heads in a row when you flip the coin only 10 times are very low, about 1 in 1,024. Flip the coin 710 times and the chances of seeing at least one run of 10 straight heads is 50 percent, or one in two. Flipping the coin 5,000 times? We’d see at least one string of 10 in a row 99.3 percent of the time. At 10,000 times, it’s virtually a lock (99.99 percent) that we’ll see at least one run of 10 heads in a row.
In 1953, the psychologist Alphonse Chapanis of Johns Hopkins documented how badly human subjects understand randomness by asking t
hem to write down long sequences of random numbers (0 through 9). He found that almost no one chose to use repetitive pairs such as 222 and 333. Subjects instead tended to alternate digits and avoid repetition. In short, they couldn’t create random sequences. This bias can be gamed or taken advantage of. State lotteries, for instance, have an overwhelming number of tickets with alternating numbers and very few with repetitive digits. Since most lottery pots are split among the winners, your chances of having the pot all to yourself are greater if you pick 22222 versus 65821. Nobody picks 22222. But why not? The lottery is random. Drawing 22222 is just as likely as drawing 65821. You have to get all five digits correct and in the same order in either case. But people don’t see it that way. (Imagine if the Powerball numbers actually came out 22222. Most people’s first thought would be that something was suspicious.)
The same thing is true with flipping a coin. If you get ten heads in a row, what’s the likelihood that the next flip will be heads? Don’t be fooled—it’s 50 percent, the same as it is on any single coin flip. Most people think the chances of getting heads will actually be lower than 50 percent—the opposite of momentum. They know they should see roughly the same number of heads as tails (50–50), so they feel that if they’ve seen ten heads in a row, they’re due for a tails. A tails has to emerge to balance things out. But it doesn’t. There is no law of averages. If the process is random, there’s no predictability. This is also what drives the “gambler’s fallacy.” Gamblers on losing streaks erroneously believe they’re due and keep gambling, thinking that their luck has to balance out. But if the whole thing is random, you aren’t due for anything. Your chances haven’t changed at all.
Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won Page 23
