mopper8 wrote:ElGee wrote:(1) Late-Game Bias.
If you acknowledge that all points are the same, and all plays count the same, then why is the end of the game ever more important? As an example (since I'm quoting Chuck), if you believe "pressure" is greater at the end of games, then why does it matter that the pressure is greater? All the possessions are still the same...
All points are the same, but not all possessions are the same. Pressure doesn't matter. But here's a really simple way to think about:
A team that is down 4 points with roughly 75 possessions ahead of them will probably have roughly the same probability of winning as they did when it was 0-0, or at least something decently close to it. Certainly something non-zero and in fact far great than zero.
A team that is down 4 points with 1 possession ahead of it has essentially zero chance of winning the game.
Now, everything that lead up to that 4 point differential at the end of the game
matters, but there is a larger margin of error in the first quarter than there is in the fourth quarter, because you will have more opportunities to make up ground, fix mistakes, etc. As the number of remaining possessions shrinks, the margin of error per possession reduces to zero, until a team (and its constituent players) has to literally play perfectly to win (or conversely to play truly terribly to lose).
Apologies I can't link you to this article and research right now. This is all addressed there. In short:
What you've described is why people feel pressure and why they
perceive possessions to be more important -- It doesn't actually change the importance of the possession. We do this because we can assign consequences to an action with greater confidence, and thus overemphasize THAT one action. When Horry's shot was in the air at the buzzer of Game 5 in 2002, by definition, everyone
knew the game hinged on that shot. But this is just a temporal bias -- just because no one
knew the outcome of the second did they attach the same meaning to Walker's buzzer beater. Only once the entire game is finished (all possessions completed) can we see the game hinged on Walker's shot
and every other shot, because it was a one-point game.
An easy way to see this: In soccer, is the 5th penalty kick the most important?
Doctor MJ wrote:The answer to that to me is always about understanding what a team's actual capabilities are and their ability to summon them as needed.
To be clear -- the data show the opposite pattern. Basketball players aren't selective procrastinators -- most good teams create separation early, they certainly don't wait to turn it on till the end. You cite the 2011 Mavs as a rare example of crazy clutch play in a small sample. By quarter that year they were: +1.5 +0.5 +0.4 +1.5. Certainly a team that was better at getting into their stuff when the game tightened up...and to me that's just called a
good team, perhaps with better resilience. NBA teams take a sub-optimal Game Theory approach at times at the end of games -- the teams who don't change their offenses are historically the one's that stand out in those tightened possessions. Some teams also have better depth. Neither of those changes that every possession is equally important until there is essentially no change of winning the game.
I'm actually wondering what I'm missing on Love -- does he/Minny have some pattern of underperforming down the stretch? I thought they were just abnormally unlucky this year -- is this a multi-year thing?
