Scorecasting (34 page)

In some instances, icing the kicker may exact a psychological price. In other instances, it may backfire, as it did with Jay Feely, giving the kicker the equivalent of a free dress rehearsal. In the vast majority of cases, the kick will be successful based simply on mechanics and how cleanly the ball is struck (and how well the ball is snapped and placed by the holder), not on whether the kicker had an extra 90 or so seconds to consider the weight of the occasion.

Former Tampa Bay Buccaneer kicker
Matt Bryant in an interview with the
Tampa Tribune
summed it up this way: “I think when you’re at this level, nothing like that should matter. If it does, you probably don’t belong here.”

Kickers aren’t the only athletes opposing coaches try to ice. Take the waning seconds of an NBA game. A team is whistled for a foul. Just as the free throw shooter steps to the line, the opposing team reflexively calls a time-out to ice the shooter.

Just like icing the kicker in the NFL, it’s a dubious strategy. We examined all free throws attempted in the last two minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime of all NBA games from 2006 to 2010 when the teams were within five points of each other—in other words, “pressure” free throws. When a time-out was called just before the free throws (icing), the shooter was successful an average of 76 percent of the time. When there was no time-out called, the free throw percentage was … 76 percent.

Next, we looked at only the first free throw attempt—the one directly after the time-out—and ignored the second since a player might have adjusted his shot after the first attempt or his nerves might have settled. There was, again, no difference. We even looked exclusively at situations in which the score was tied and thus a made free throw would have put a team in the lead. Again, there was no difference between shooters who were iced and those who weren’t.

There might be valid reasons for a team to call a time-out before a high-pressure kick or free throw. The coach might want to devise a strategy to block the kick or set up a play in the event of a miss. The defensive team might want to create the appearance that it’s doing
something
rather than standing by idly. They might want to ensure that the rights-paying television network has the opportunity to air an additional series of commercials—annoying the fans in the process. But they shouldn’t expect the time-out to have any bearing on the subsequent play.

Icing doesn’t freeze a player or heat him up. You might call it a lukewarm strategy.

THE MYTH OF THE HOT HAND
 

In the sprawling clubhouse of the New York Mets, David Wright’s locker is featured prominently, square in the middle of the room, near the front door. The symbolism is unmistakable. Wright isn’t just a spectacular young third baseman and a handsome, genial guy born without the jerk chromosome. He is the face of the franchise. So it is that his locker is positioned in such a way that the media can always find him for a quote, teammates can observe how professionally he comports himself, and Mets employees can locate him when they need to corral him to meet with corporate sponsors or tape a promotional video or sign the cast of a season ticket holder’s kid.

But early in the 2010 season there were few good vibes emanating from Wright’s double-wide clubhouse stall. He was struggling at the plate: smacking nothing but air with his swings, grounding feebly into double plays, and taking pitches for called third strikes. After going hitless in four at-bats the previous night, Wright arrived for a late April game against the Chicago Cubs hitting .229,
a full 78 points below his career average of .307. Only 11 of his 48 at-bats had yielded a hit. As with most baseball players, his mood moved in step with his batting average. He still answered questions from the media but did so in a clipped manner, staring ahead vacantly and shifting uneasily in his chair. He cut back on the sponsor grip-and-grins and the video promos and the other extra-baseball obligations that fall to a franchise’s star player. He’d broken with routine and arrived at Citi Field early that day to take extra batting practice at the team’s indoor cage, hoping “to get my swing back to where I want it to be.”

Wright stressed that he wasn’t “panicking or anything like that,” and his remedies seemed sensible, especially given the range of cures that exist for slumping baseball players. Other batters have changed their diet, burned articles of clothing, and consulted team chaplains after a few hitless games. It is former Chicago Cub
Mark Grace who’s generally credited with coining the term
slump-buster
to describe a promiscuous, unattractive woman whom a struggling player “romances” in hopes of reversing his luck at the plate. Fans of the movie
Major League
will remember that the Pedro Cerrano character sought to extricate himself from a slump by sacrificing a chicken.

Still, Wright’s slump—the perception of it, anyway—took on an aura of its own in the Mets’ clubhouse. “Soon enough David will start hitting like everyone knows he can,” said
Jeff Francoeur, then the team’s right fielder, who was batting over .300 at the time, 30 points higher than his career average. “Right now, until David gets going a little bit, the rest of us need to pick up the slack.”

You might say that the Mets needed Wright to channel his inner
Vinnie Johnson.
Basketball fans will recall Johnson as the almost sphere-shaped sixth man from the
Detroit Pistons’ “Bad Boy” teams of the late 1980s and early 1990s. A shooting guard, Johnson probably was best known for his play in game five of the 1990 NBA finals. With the Pistons leading the series 3–1, the game tied, and 00.7 seconds on the clock, Johnson popped a 15-foot jumper to give Detroit the championship. A teammate suggested that
Johnson be called 007, a nod to the time remaining when he hit his winning shot as well as to James Bond’s sharpshooting.

The nickname didn’t stick, though, mostly because Johnson already answered to one of the all-time great handles in sports. He was, of course, “the Microwave.” The nickname was conceived by
Danny Ainge of the rival Boston Celtics, who, like so many, marveled at Johnson’s ability “to get hot in a hurry.” Johnson was a classic streak shooter—a “rhythm guy,” as they say in NBA-speak—capable of both spectacular and spectacularly bad marksmanship. Like all athletes, he endured slumps. But it seemed that once he dialed in his shot, his awkwardly released jumper found the bottom of the net with brutal accuracy. “When he came in and hit his first shot, everyone knew:
Look out
,”
Chuck Daly, the late coach of the Bad Boys, once said. “I’ve never seen a player who used momentum the way Vinnie did.”

Momentum is such a vital component of sports that it’s taken on the qualities of a tangible object. Teams and athletes have it. They own it. They ride it. They take it into halftime, into the series, into the postseason. They try like hell not to give it back or lose it. A slumping player like David Wright needs to get his momentum back—and he did, by the way, boosting his season average to .314 by the time he played in the 2010 All-Star Game. A player like Vinnie the Microwave Johnson was thought to use momentum so effectively that it came to characterize his 14-year career.

But what if we told you that momentum doesn’t exist in sports?

First, let’s be clear. Indisputably,
streaks
occur in sports. In any league, in any sport, and at any level, teams and athletes perform well and perform poorly, sometimes for significant stretches of time. As of this writing, the Pittsburgh Pirates haven’t had a winning baseball season since 1992. That is a dismal run of consecutive sub-.500 seasons; in fact, it’s the longest in the history of major American team sports. When LeBron James left Cleveland in the summer of 2010, we were told (and told and told) that
no local team had won a championship since 1964. On a more successful note, at this writing, the girls’ tennis team at Walton High School outside Atlanta hasn’t lost since 2004, a run of 133 straight matches. Speaking of tennis,
Roger Federer has won at least one Major tennis championship every year since 2003. All of these are streaks, no doubt about it.

The real question is whether those streaks
predict
future performance. If you make your last few field goals or putts or send fastballs over the outfield fence, is your next attempt more likely to be successful? Does the team or player currently “riding the wave” fare better or worse in the next game than one who is not? Does recent performance directly influence immediate future performance? Or are streaks nothing more than random chance, the outcome of luck, predictive of nothing?

As the minor legend of Vinnie Johnson suggests, momentum is probably cited most often in the NBA. Some players, we’re told, cultivate a hot hand, and others cool off. Teams, we’re told, carry momentum and come into a game “on a roll.” This isn’t a new observation. Professors of psychology and behavioral economics
Thomas Gilovich and
Robert Vallone, then from Cornell, and the late Amos Tversky from Stanford studied basketball momentum and the hot hand phenomenon a generation ago. They followed the field goal attempts of nine
Philadelphia 76ers during the 1980–1981 season and found no evidence of momentum. Field goal success, they reckoned, is largely independent of past success on recent attempts. Successful shot making—or missing—had no bearing on a player’s next attempt.

Of course, field goal success may be affected by what the defense is doing. A player who has hit several shots in a row may be guarded more vigilantly, which might make his success rate on the next attempt lower. Likewise, a player who has missed his recent shots might face a more lax defense, which could mean a greater likelihood of success on his next attempt. To avoid these potential distortions of a hot or cold hand, the professors also looked at free throw shooting, which involves no defense or adjustments. Their subjects were nine players from the Boston Celtics during
the 1980–1981 and 1981–1982 seasons. Again they found no momentum or evidence of a hot hand. What players did on their previous free throws didn’t affect what they did on the next free throw.

The psychologists then looked across games and saw that being “hot” or “cold” one night did not predict performance the next night. It wasn’t necessarily that players who were “unconscious” one game automatically “came back to earth” the next game or that players who’d lost their touch in one game necessarily regained it the next night. Rather, there was simply no evidence that the streaks had any carryover effect; they simply were not predictive of future performance.

In addition to looking at NBA players, the researchers conducted an experiment using the varsity basketball players of the men’s and women’s teams at Cornell. They had the players shoot successive free throws and field goals from the exact same spot on the floor, facing no defensive, crowd, or game pressure. Once again, they found no evidence of the hot hand effect. Players who hit several shots or free throws in a row were no more likely to hit the next shot than were players who had missed several shots in a row.