The hot hand is real

The hot hand is real.  Joseph Stromberg at Vox  reports on this working paper by Joshua Benjamin Miller and Adam Sanjurjo and the decades of related research.  I had thought that the reason the hot hand appeared to not exist might be that players take harder shots when they’ve made their previous shots, or that defenses pay extra attention when someone gets hot.  It turns out that this is partially true, but also tests in the classical papers are underpowered, which I learned from Jordan Ellenberg describing a paper by Kevin Korb and Michael Stillwell.