Hot Hands, Again

I return to the “hot hands” controversy by revisiting an earlier paper by Wardrop [16] that looked at basketball data for players Robey and Bird. The relevant data can be found in the earlier section called “More Fallacies” but for convenience the table of collapsed scores is reproduced below. My goal is to use the hypothesis testing procedure reviewed in the previous vignette to add something different to the biased estimation analysis of Miller and Sanjurjo of Section 4, again indicating a validation of sorts for players being “in the zone.” I’ll be testing the significance of second throws in terms of a successful hit being followed by another “make” using the combined scores of just the two players. A similar analysis exhibits no statistical significance when the players are considered separately.