The Hot Hand
When streaks become self-fulfilling
Description
On a January night in 2015, in a stuffy gym in San Antonio, a Golden State Warriors guard named Klay Thompson did something that made even the statisticians in the room lean forward. In a single quarter, twelve minutes of basketball, he scored 37 points. He took thirteen shots. He made all thirteen. Nine of them were three-pointers. When a player gets that locked in, everyone in the building feels the same thing at once: he cannot miss. Pass him the ball. He's hot. Ben Cohen, then a Wall Street Journal reporter, was watching, and the moment sent him down a rabbit hole that became a book.
The problem is that for decades, the smartest people who studied this had a firm answer, and the answer was no. The hot hand — the intuition that success breeds more success, that a made shot makes the next one likelier — was, they said, an illusion. A famous 1985 study crunched the numbers and found nothing. No streaks beyond what chance would produce anyway. The belief was real, the phenomenon was not. Fans saw patterns in noise, the way we see faces in clouds. Case closed, for thirty years.
Except Klay Thompson had just made thirteen shots in a row. And except that, around the time Cohen started digging, two young economists found something buried in the original math that nobody had noticed — a subtle error that flipped the conclusion. Cohen's book sits in that gap: between what we feel in our gut when someone is on fire, and what the numbers were supposed to prove. It's a story about basketball, but it keeps escaping the court.
The question we’re asking : Does the hot hand exist — and if the answer kept flipping, what does that say about how sure we are of anything?What we’ll see : A famous performance, a landmark study, a hidden statistical mistake, and the stubborn human need to find a signal in the streak.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The shot that couldn't miss
Cohen opens where the feeling lives — inside the game, at the moment a player stops being ordinary. Klay Thompson's third quarter against the Sacramento Kings is his set piece, and he tells it slowly, because the slowness is the point. Each shot went in. Then the next. Then the next. His teammates started feeding him on purpose, defenders draped over him, and it didn't matter. By the end of the quarter he'd broken a record for points in twelve minutes that had stood for decades. Everyone who saw it walked away certain they'd witnessed something real, not lucky.
That certainty is the hot hand. Not a theory, a sensation. Anyone who has played a sport, or watched one, knows the version of it — the sense that a shooter, a striker, a server has crossed into a zone where the usual odds don't apply. Cohen is careful not to mock the feeling. He shares it. The book's warmth comes from the fact that he clearly believes his own eyes, and he assumes we do too. The hot hand isn't a superstition invented by gamblers; it's one of the most widely held intuitions in all of sport.
02Chapter 2 — The paper that killed the hot hand
The people who said no were not cranks. In 1985, three researchers — Thomas Gilovich, Robert Vallone, and Amos Tversky — published a study that would define the debate for a generation. Tversky, in particular, was one of the most influential psychologists alive, half of the partnership with Daniel Kahneman that reshaped how we understand human judgment. When he turned his attention to the hot hand, people listened.
Their method was disarmingly simple. They took the shooting records of the Philadelphia 76ers, looked at what happened after a made shot versus a missed one, and asked whether a make actually raised the odds of the next make. It didn't. A player was no more likely to hit after a hit than after a miss. They ran the same test on Boston Celtics free throws and on a controlled shooting experiment with Cornell players. Same result every time. The sequences looked exactly like what you'd get from a coin that didn't care what it had just done.
03Chapter 3 — The mistake nobody caught for thirty years
Then, around 2015, two economists named Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo went looking at the original method and found something strange. It hid in a place no one thinks to check: the very definition of the question. If you take a sequence of coin flips, look only at the flips that came right after a heads, and measure how often those are also heads, you would expect the answer to be fifty percent. It isn't. It's less. And the shorter the sequence, the further below fifty it falls.
This is genuinely counterintuitive, and Cohen works hard to make it land. The intuition breaks because of how you select which flips to count. By choosing to look only at the flips following a heads, you subtly bias the sample against another heads — the act of measuring changes the expected result. It's a cousin of a classic probability puzzle, and it had been sitting inside the hot-hand method the whole time. The 1985 study had compared real shooters against a benchmark of fifty percent. But the correct benchmark, given how they'd cut the data, was lower.
04Chapter 4 — Why we can't stop seeing streaks
Step back from the free-throw line and the hot-hand saga becomes a story about the fragility of belief. Twice now, the smart position has reversed. First the intuition was obviously true, then it was famously false, then the falseness turned out to rest on a hidden mistake. What survives all these reversals is the thing that started it: the human compulsion to read a signal into a streak. We are built to detect patterns, and that machinery doesn't switch off when the pattern is random — it barely switches off when a Nobel-adjacent study tells us to.
Cohen keeps pulling the phenomenon off the court because it clearly lives everywhere. He follows it into a Hollywood studio betting its slate on a director's run of hits, into the career of a stock picker who can't tell talent from luck, into the way we judge our own good and bad weeks. The trouble is that streaks are simultaneously real and treacherous. Believing you're hot can loosen you, help you, feed the very success that started it — and it can also make you take the reckless shot, ride the run past the point where the run was ever there.
05Conclusion
Cohen ends back where the feeling always wins — the certainty in a gym that someone cannot miss. Klay Thompson's thirteen straight shots still happened, and after everything the researchers argued and un-argued, the intuition that made everyone lean forward turns out to have been closer to right than the famous study that dismissed it. Not because the fans were smarter than Tversky, but because a small buried assumption steered a generation of experts past an effect that was quietly there.