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The debate surrounding the hot hand in the NBA has been ongoing for many years. However, many of the previous works on this theme has focused on only the very next sequential shot attempt, often on very select players. This work looks in…
This paper aims to revisit and expand upon previous work on the "hot hand" phenomenon in basketball, specifically in the NBA. Using larger, modern data sets, we test streakiness of shooting patterns and the presence of hot hand behavior in…
Streaks of success have always fascinated people and a lot of research has been conducted to identify whether the "hot hand" effect is real. While sports have provided an appropriate platform for studying this phenomenon, the majority of…
Sports data analytics is a relevant topic in applied statistics that has been growing in importance in recent years. In basketball, a player or team has a hot hand when their performance during a match is better than expected or they are on…
We investigate the hot hand phenomenon using data on 110,513 free throws taken in the National Basketball Association (NBA). As free throws occur at unevenly spaced time points within a game, we consider a state-space model formulated in…
The existence of "Hot Hands" and "Streaks" in sports and gambling is hotly debated, but there is no uncertainty about the recent batting-average of the New York Times: it is now two-for-two in mangling and misunderstanding elementary…
Many popular sports involve matches between two teams or players where each team have the possibility of scoring points throughout the match. While the overall match winner and result is interesting, it conveys little information about the…
We study a class of permutation tests of the randomness of a collection of Bernoulli sequences and their application to analyses of the human tendency to perceive streaks of consecutive successes as overly representative of positive…
I demonstrate that repetition heats players up, while interruption cools players down in NBA free throw shooting. My analysis also suggests that fatigue and stress come into play. If, as seems likely, all four of these effects have…
Scoring in a basketball game is a process highly dynamic and non-linear type. The level of NBA teams improve each season. They incorporate to their rosters the best players in the world. These and other mechanisms, make the scoring in the…
Increased data availability has stimulated the interest in studying sports prediction problems via analytical approaches; in particular, with machine learning and simulation. We characterize several models that have been proposed in the…
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of…
The idea that the success rate of a team increases when playing home is broadly accepted and documented for a wide variety of sports. Investigations on the so-called home advantage phenomenon date back to the 70's and every since has…
Basketball is often referred to as "a game of runs." We investigate the appropriateness of this claim using data from the full NBA 2016-17 season, comparing actual longest runs of scoring events to what long run theory predicts under the…
Professional sports constitute an important part of people's modern life. People spend substantial amounts of time and money supporting their favorite players and teams, and sometimes even riot after games. However, how team performance…
The main objective of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the margin of victory can be predicted solely by the rankings of the opposing teams in NCAA Division I men's basketball games. Several past studies have modeled this…
Statistical applications in sports have long centered on how to best separate signal (e.g. team talent) from random noise. However, most of this work has concentrated on a single sport, and the development of meaningful cross-sport…
The prevailing belief propagated by NBA league observers is that the workload of the NBA season dramatically influences a player's performance$^{1,2,3,4,5}$. We offer an analysis of cross game player fatigue that calls into question the…
In sports betting it is easier to predict the winner of a game match than the team that covers the bet. Since, a winner team might not cover a bet. This study focuses on the relation of the variable win to the betting variable cover the…
The hot-hand theory posits that an athlete who has performed well in the recent past performs better in the present. We use multilevel logistic regression to test this theory for National Hockey League playoff goaltenders, controlling for a…