Is the Hot Hand Real? I Tested 1.16 Million NBA Shots

Is the hot hand real, or is it just in our heads? I took every NBA shot of the last five seasons, 1,163,241 of them, and ran the test psychologists and economists have been fighting over since 1985. 0:00 Three in a row 0:49 A famous fight 1:25 The raw numbers 2:22 The shuffle test 3:16 The hot hand appears 4:09 Free throws 4:39 The longest streaks 5:21 Are some players streaky? 6:13 Why we believe it 7:03 What coaches should do 7:23 The verdict How it was measured • Every field-goal attempt, regular season and playoffs, 2021-22 through 2025-26 (end-of-quarter heaves excluded). • "Hot" = the player's previous three shots in the same game were all makes; "cold" = all misses. • Baseline: each player's makes and misses within each game shuffled into random order (30 times), so good shooters and good nights can't fake a hot hand. • Shot difficulty: every shot gets an expected make rate from league-wide FG% by distance and shot value. • Free throws: second of two, split by the first, each player compared to himself. • "Streaky shooters": each player's hot-hand effect measured on two random halves of his games (226 players with enough shots). Player photos (Wikimedia Commons) • Chris Paul: Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... • Anthony Davis: Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... • Alperen Sengun: Zafer, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi... Source: NBA play-by-play data. Analysis and graphics are my own. Narration: AI-generated voice (script written by me). #NBA #NBAStats #BasketballAnalytics #PossessionMath