[swillden]

Because rightly or wrongly the player feels like at different moments there are different probabilities that they will make the shot based on all sorts of things.

That is certainly true... but does the player's feeling have anything to do with the actual probability that the ball will go into the hole? According to the Cornell study mentioned by the article, the answer is generally "no".

[adsyoung]

Maybe not a great deal but there is something going on there. Discussing basketball in terms of coin flips which takes skill and technique out of the equation is definetely missing something key or so it would seem to the player. If you can prove that statistically it doesn't matter then so be it.

[davi]

Probably no one is ever going to see this, but a cool idea just occurred to me: what if your ability to attend is stochastic?

I play basketball too, and have had 'hot' nights and crummy nights -- and subjectively, on the few really good nights I've had, I knew when shots are going to go in, and when they were going to miss, and I knew, much more clearly than normal, where the hoop was and how to get the ball there. This did not feel like post-hoc rationalization of a successful basket. I was predicting accurately which shots would hit, and which would miss, before the ball when in.

Yet, analyzing players' performance, their streaks are indistinguishable from what would be expected statistically.

The explanation that reconciles both set of observations is that the ability to attend to salient data (weight of ball, position of feet, etc.) is itself a random process.

Note also that this attention may not be conscious: your motor control circuitry is doing huge amounts of processing that you're not at all aware of during a game.

[adsyoung]

Yeah doing some more thought on the issue I reached the same conclusion. It would be great if someone could prove that I am consistent enough in what I can control and my body is also producing a roughly consistent random factor on top of that. If so, this would make the relationship to a coin flip a lot more sensible.