In the playoffs? For a fanbase or for a team? I mean, if we'd have been crushed in Game One and won Game 2 105-100, then we'd probably be pretty happy in here, all things considered. But is there something to be said for regression? The homer in me says "wait 'til we get to the Rose Garden--we'll blow them away in the next 2 games." The basketball fan inside of me says "we got exposed on a bunch of different levels, and they have the momentum". What say you? Momentum is a big deal, or having HCA now is a bigger deal?
certainly didn't hurt the Rockets last year and didn't help us in either the 92 Finals or 2000 WCF where we lost 1 and won 2. I'll take a 1-1 split regardless of how badly we lost in Game 2
The playoffs are a series of revenge games: you act, adjust, re-adjust... etc. Getting the first win forces the other team to react to you, but then you get a change to react as well if they beat you again. So the first winner is in the driver's seat, getting games 1-3-5-7 as their action/reaction games, where the team that loses game 1 gets only 2-4-6 as their reaction games (since their initial action in game 1 failed). This is all because, after a win, you try the same thing in the next game because nothing succeeds like success. You don't totally change your game between win 1 and the next game. This type of revenge/reaction bounceback is expected in the playoffs; if we'd won game 2 instead of game 1, we'd be heading home, but with the other team more ready to react to our win... we'd be more vulnerable in a game 3 having won game 2. Now, we've seen their next move, and will come out in game 3 ready to make our next move. Our system won't be stale; we'll have fresh motivation and ammunition to make our next shift in strategy. I'm very glad we won game 1, and not surprised we lost game 2. I think this helps us for game 3. And if the home crowd can help us out, we might be able to take game 4 as well.
Grant Hill and Jason Richardson had career nights-if that happens again, which I seriously doubt, then the Suns are going all the way. I just think that we ran into a team that was playing with a lot of desperation, got their crowd behind them early, and got a bunch of flukey in-close misses from us. No way we get blown out like that again.
History: The Lakers were crushed by the Blazers in Game 2 of the 2000 WCF. They came back to win Games 3 and 4 on the RG court. Unless a team is mentally fragile and prone to collapse, like the 99 Blazer squad was, momentum plays a very limited role game to game.
In terms of tangible results (wins vs. losses, makes vs. misses), momentum has been statistically exposed as insignificant over and over again. The simple fact is that good teams playing well tend to win, and this naturally leads to streaks. Fans and talking heads observe these streaks and call it "momentum", when in fact it's just a natural result of playing well. Whatever psychological boost a player might get from having won the previous game is almost always washed out by the many other, more significant factors. From "Winning Streaks in Sports and the Misperception of Momentum" From "The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences"
There was a great explanation of those concepts in a recent Radio Lab episode: basically a "hot streak" is an illusion where players are no more likely to hit the next shot as the shot before it, but because they happen to hit the shot, the brain retroactively assigns a reason for that confluence of randomness ("Oh, he must have a hot hand"). Because randomness does occur in clumps, not spread out evenly, this sort of thing does happen enough to make the "hot hand" seem like a real occurrence, when it's actually just the brain trying to find a pattern in a string of randomness.
Nice call -- http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/09/11 Basically, the human brain is just not very good at recognizing (or imitating) random distributions.
Are you talking about randonmess by the observer, or a feeling of "hotness" by the athlete. I ask because I had periods in my career where I knew the next shot was going to go into the basket, and it didn't matter who was guarding me or how far behind the 3pt line I was. Was this confidence a product of hitting a few random shots before that, or did I make the baskets because I had high confidence? I've actually wondered about that at times, and I'm sure most people who played collegiate, or heck, even HS sports have had that "out of body" experience. A very interesting concept, BlazerCaravan. I'll see if I can find that episode on Hulu.
Thanks for the link! I was just going to look for it. Something that I ponder is this: does the elevated confidence level that some athletes get from a random "hot" streak actually impact their play after that random stretch is over. In other words, can certain athletes improve peformance and "beat" chance simply by their state of mind?
The brain, the reason we're successful as a species without claws or fangs or fur, is very very very good at recognizing patterns to exploit. Migration paths and timing, expected locations of water holes and so on. What made us great hunters is still used today; you see it in very very talented individuals in finance and sports: the "killer instinct" is all about exploitng those patterns you detect instinctively. So it makes perfect sense that (a) a highly sensitive pattern-matching brain is good at sports; (b) that this same brain will generate false positives (like the "hot hand"); and (c) that because this brain is good at sports, there's a bunch of people in and around sports that think the "hot hand" is very real. Make no mistake: even though it's a false positive, it's not a liability. Why? Because if Rudy hits two 3-pointers in a row, but then misses 2, the "hot hand" pattern is broken. Other patterns ("cold streak") take over. But discipline ("shooters need to shoot out of a slump") allows randomness to improve the chances of success (i.e., the more you shoot, the more chances you have to hit a shot).
It is an interesting question, and from what I understand, the exact psychological impact of confidence itself is still very much an open question. However, from just a numbers standpoint, it's pretty easy to measure the impact of momentum. Just tally up the results of all shots that happened immediately AFTER a made shot. If shooting streaks are meaningful for predicting future results, the resulting percentage of made baskets should be significantly higher than that player's overall shooting percentage. This is basically what the researchers did in the papers I linked above, and they discovered that there is no such increase -- even after a made basket, won game, or whatever, the odds of success on the following try were around the same as they would have been if they'd lost previously. Of course, this doesn't factor in the impact of confidence itself -- that's pretty hard to quantify. But the results seem to at least suggest that the perception of being "on fire" is a result of a string of successes, rather than the other way around.
That's a question that (depending on your angle) is either answered as "no, confidence actually doesn't matter" or is sidestepped. Here's where emergence and reality kind of meld: the confidence is real, but the chances don't improve. But, because you live in a reality where you did hit that shot, your brain assigns your confidence as a reason you hit it, because it loves to find causality. Causality = survival, so that's the instinct it has.
I'd like to see more study on confidence during and after a streak, though. I actually think that chance can improve based on the confidence level of a given athlete, and concentration may also factor into the conversation. Then again, maybe the statistics would prove this theory wrong over time, although it would be near impossible to capture "confidence" as any sort of scientific value in a study. Very interesting topics in this thread. Again, using personal experience as someone who defined the word "streak shooter", when I wasn't hitting early, I wasn't hitting all game. When I was hitting early, I was hitting all game (not 100%, of course, but shots still felt good coming off the hand). Perhaps Martell is somehow related to me?
This has devolved a bit from "team" momentum to individual, but still fascinating. I've seen it more in golf. If I've been "feeling it", maybe the chances that my muscle memory is better after a few good shots increases the chances of a good next shot, or maybe not. But the confidence factor is undoubtedly there. Yips are a pretty good indicator, right? A poor confidence factor can trigger unconscious flaws in muscle memory, causing you to pull a putt or not follow through or something. Likewise, if I've been striping my drives, I don't worry about hitting the trees on the right side, b/c I haven't sliced all day.
Same thing can happen when shooting a basketball, although it's less obvious. The 'yips' tend to be a feeling of tightness while shooting, almost like you're trying to shoot through you mind trying to make you miss. I often think of this when I watch Martell try to make shots after missing one or two. There is no real difference (typically) to the observer, but the athlete knows they are fighting through something.
