MUSCLE MEMORY AND HOT HANDS FOR BASKETBALL PLAYERS.

MUSCLE MEMORY AND HOT HANDS FOR BASKETBALL PLAYERS. I was really pleased to find the neuroscience blog of Jonah Lehrer. I looked at the archives. This is a consistently interesting blog. One of the posts described the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky that concluded that basketball players do not have hot shooting streaks. It makes sense that people would make the mistake of thinking they do because it has been shown that people generally underestimate the extent to which a series of random tosses of a fair coin will generate long strings of heads or tails. I was amused that I found the post just before Jamal Crawford of the Knicks had an evening when he missed his first four shots and then hit 16 in a row. I’m inclined to believe that Crawford’s success was a random event. I don’t believe in hot streaks, but I do have doubts about a related proposition. It seems to me that a basketball player has a stroke and that his stroke can be corrected (or “grooved”). Basketball players do warm up by practicing shooting and Michael Jordan was known for taking a lot of practice shots before a game. If muscle memory is important in shooting, the best test would be of free throw shooting. If the first shot was a little long, the player can make a minor correction on the second. I did do calculations for the free throw shooting of the Boston Celtic players given in the Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky paper. Eight of the nine players did about five or six percent better on the second shot of two (Kevin McHale was the exception). Scanty evidence at best.