SinceGatlingWasARookie wrote:What about streak shooters? Is there any debate whether streak shooting exists?
When way say so and so is heating up?
Or he is feeling it now? Do people doubt the concept of a player heating up or getting in the groove?
Why shouldn't there be a psychological component to getting in the groove. Why shouldn't a little extra pressure help some people to focus better and remove extraneous small random motions from their shot?
The fine motor skills seem to be changeable.
From the perspective of a non athlete who sometimes gets out of shape and needs stretching, little hitches in the muscles ruin an otherwise good shot. But those hitches can release and the smooth motion can be restored after warming up.
You will see some statisticians claim that streak shooting doesn't exist, but you'll see others who are wiser refrain from such statements.
My opinion: Streak shooting exists, but it typically manifests itself in ways that both reinforce the phenomenon to spectators and leave statisticians without any data to back it up:
Guy gets "hot".
Guy is quicker to shoot.
Guy ends up taking tougher shots because he's quicker to shoot.
Being quicker to shoot means you shoot more which means you're more likely to get several buckets in a row, leaving the spectator saying "He's on fire!". But the cocky guy taking tougher shots then drives down his percentages, which is what the statisticians are looking at.
Why shouldn't there be a psych component? I'm sure there is.
Why shouldn't that help their fine motor mechanics? Well, first, the key thing is it just doesn't according to everything I've ever seen on this. In theory it could, but when we look at guys people agree are clutch, we don't see that. What we instead see is that those guys just shoot a lot in the clutch.
And this is really my point with all of this: Not that anything doesn't actually exist, but wherever we see people thinking they see percentages when they watch the game, they aren't. The human brain just doesn't work like that.
With that said, while it's theoretically possible for fine motor skills to go up when the adrenaline is up, form is form. If you couldn't get the right form when you were practicing it a 1000 times, well then your muscle memory is going to have the wrong form. So all we're really talking about in "clutch" play is a kind of focus that let's you match your muscle memory ideal that you developed in practice.
Hence, to see someone show major effects along the lines of what you describe, we'd have to see someone who created a great muscle memory in practice, then got sloppy in game, but then pulled it all together again in the clutch. Not saying that doesn't exist, but I don't think it's typical. I think for the most part guys have their adrenaline up when they are out there even early in the game, and while they may slack on defense early on, they rarely chuck shots without focus.
I'll mention again though: I think free throws are different, and that relates to why I think clutch/choke-thinking is a far bigger deal in other sports.
Growing up I played 3 sports a lot: basketball, soccer, and tennis. In only one of those sports did I really feel myself go hot & cold severely: tennis. And if you watch enough tennis, you can see how a guy who was doing fine for 2 sets all of a sudden falls apart.
It has everything to do, imho, with the fact that you have more time to think and very little room for error - plus the matter that you have to choose your strategy constantly. With kids, you see what tends to happen is they end up backing off their power and just "dink" the shot over for fear of losing, knowing that if they miss even once they lose the point...and if they play anyone good, this guarantees their loss. (You can still see this to some degree with the pros actually, but their "dink" is typically still very fast.)
In basketball, everyone knows you can't make them all, and there's no such thing as "dinking" you shot. You have one motion in your shot. It's what you've practice. You don't change it unless you do so to avoid getting blocked. If you go into that moment fully intending to shoot if you get a shot of a certain quality, you're going to shoot it, and if it doesn't quite go in, you're not going to beat yourself up for it.
Unless it's a super-easy shot of course...like a lay up, or a free throw.
Re: hitches. Right, so practice makes perfect. You can improve your muscle memory, no doubt about that. It's just that if you've never developed the muscle memory to have a smooth J in the past, it's not going to magically appear because the game's on the line.
