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Originally Posted by TimTimSalabim
I remember reading about this study awhile back, and one of their claims is that previous studies were flawed because they studied basketball shooting where defenses could adjust if someone appears to be on a hot streak (double-teaming etc.), thus counteracting it and making it look like it doesn't exist. But I've read about a few of the other studies and I'm pretty sure they studied free throw shooting (where the defense can't adjust obviously) and not field goals for that very reason. So it seems to me that this Stanford study is attacking a straw man, which makes me suspicious of their conclusions. I'm interested to hear other takes on it though.
I agree that they overstate their case a bit, i.e.
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We argue that this difference is attributable to endogenous defensive responses: basketball presents sufficient opportunity for defensive responses to equate shooting probabilities across players whereas baseball does not.
because they don't actually show that this is what is happening in basketball, they merely theorize it. But w.r.t. the free throw paper, the problem I have is that people aren't really referring to free throws when they say a player has the hot hand in basketball. Thus I don't really see it as a strawman. The body of literature on the hot hand fallacy is so voluminous now with the bulk of the research stacking up against hot hands that demonstrating a hot effect in a major sport is novel enough to pursue publication.