The psychologists
suspect that sporting commentators, short on insightful things to say, are just
finding patterns in what amounts to a long series of coin tosses over a long
playing season. They propose a more rigorous test. In basketball, they look
at all the instances of a player’s baskets, and observe the percentage of times
that player’s next shot is also a basket. A similar calculation is made for the
shots immediately following misses. If a basket is more likely to follow a
basket than to follow a miss, then there really is something to the theory of
the hot hand.