Gary Sutton

And I also looked at a probability theory from a French mathematician named Pierre Simon Laplace.

And he called it the rule of succession.

And it was based around very small sample sizes, which is what you get from a single player in a single game on free throw attempts, right?

Even a player like Sean Harden, or James Harden, I'm sorry.

You're Sean.

I'll take it.

You're probably better than him, actually, in many ways.

I wish.

You're still talking about very, very small sample sizes, right?

Because the hot hand only applies to a single player within a single game, right?

It doesn't transcend across players or across games, right?

And he plotted it out, that if you truly had dependent events and one success led to another, which led to another, you would see basically a probability curve that comes very close to 100%.

It's never 100% because there's always some chance that you could have a miss or you could have anything that's due to failure.

And so when I looked at the data, okay, I figured if there really is a hot hand and I plotted it out for players that took a fair number of free throws, like someone like James Harden, for instance, it should resemble a Laplace curve.

what's that it's the it's the rule of succession where your um your probability of making a shot is predicated on if you made the previous shot okay so with each successive make your probabilities are incrementally increasing but at a diminishing rate got it so

If I plotted out free throw makes and misses, would it look like that curve?

Not exactly, but would it resemble it?

Or alternatively, would it look more like coin flips that are independent events, right?

And to me, they look more like coin flips.

Oh yeah, oh yeah.