[codethief]

Fantastic comment! In fact, it seems that sports games, or at least NBA games, can be described accurately and consistently using (slightly modified) random walks. Put differently: Outcomes are indeed random and there's not much machine learning you can do here.

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.2825

And here's a slightly more exciting description of a talk one of the authors gave on that topic at UMass Amherst last year:

https://www.physics.umass.edu/seminars/statistics-of-basketb...

EDIT: I was too stupid to realize that the paper linked above actually supports the parent's opinion, i.e. the idea that successful predictions are statistical artifacts, contrary to what I was thinking earlier.