Great 3 point shot article (not about UConn)

Smuggling??  Because ... the hot hand is less likely to be caught crossing the border?  Cheshire grin.  

Authors who imagine that sports will follow randomness have clearly never been good at anything physical.  Top soccer players don't aim for the goal. They aim for a zone ... or a spot in the net.


I "played" with Phil Mickleson once...  Well ... he spoke to our group, then played a hole with each group in our scramble.  LOL.  Anyway, during his talk before the golf started, he had a driver in one hand and was lazily swinging it through the zone while talking to us.  Believe me when I say that the same seven blades of grass bent to the east, then to the west, then exactly back again ... on every. single. mindless. swing. 

Sure, randomness has an impact, but the entire purpose of athletic skill development is to give randomness a smaller and smaller role in the outcome.  Even the authors would recognize that Kaleena has a much higher probability of hitting the next attempt from three than I would.  Why then do they imagine that probability is fixed at the granularity level of one individual?  Do they forget that they too have good days and bad ones, or that Simone Biles didn't hit a perfect beam routine at two years old?  

One of the best interviews I ever saw that touched on this topic was with Larry Bird in his prime.  He talked about having a notch counter in his head.  Higher on the stick meant to give a little more oomph to the shot.  If he was a little short during a game (even if the ball went in!!!), he would step up to the next notch because he must be getting tired.  If he was long, he'd drop a couple of hash-marks and see if that did the trick.  I was awestruck at his level of thinking.  He had shot so may times that he could work out a system and a scale for "a little bit more or less" and then practiced enough to memorize and then to hit that moving target consistently.  And his accuracy improved over the course of games. 

Marathoners have a similar level system.  Running too fast will result in an oxygen and/or energy deficit.  Slow down, and they can recover a bit, but they lose ground.  Find the correct "My Home Pace" and they maximize the ground covered without threat of a bonk or an injury.  Then they adjust from there, to make competitors push when they don't want to, or psychologically convincing other runners that they might as well give up.   

So, while the statistical probability of 105 consecutive threes does help to debunk the theory, most athletes do not need this proof.  The original paper is based on impeccable math applied to flawed assumptions.  Unfortunately, this is a common mistake.