ABSTRACT
The widely held belief in the “hot hand” in basketball suggests that a player experiencing a streak should be given the next shot. However Gilovich, Vallone & Tversky (1985) found that streaks of hits in basketball shooting were no more likely than chance, so basketball shots are independent events. Thus it has been widely accepted that belief in the hot hand is a fallacy. Starting with the question of what are the goals of basketball players, Burns (2001) argued that the data only demonstrated that the hot hand is invalid as an individual cue to when a player will hit a shot, not that it is an invalid allocation cue for deciding who to give the next shot to. Streaks should occur more often for good shooters.
