Hoops

The Likelihood of Overtime in Basketball

Without delving into the stats behind such a phenomenon, I have often been intrigued by what I had observed was the tendency of teams to play their way into overtime.

My amateur psychologist and ex-player insight suggests that both teams subconsciously favour overtime as an outcome (as the time counts down and there are less opportunities to win or lose the game) as it is a non-negative outcome. If the game is tied, they are still in it. If the game is lost, then they have no way of retrieving the game. So both winning and losing teams have a motivation to go into overtime. The losing team has nothing to lose, their shots are more likely to be relaxed and so create an overtime. The winning team doesn't have the same imperative to make a shot as the consequence of missing the shot, isn't as drastic as the consequence of missing the shot when losing.

My hypothesis is there's a stronger motivation to 'not be the one who lost the game' than be the one who won the game. Do we spend more time analysing 'winners' or 'chokers'? You are not a choker if you send a game into a overtime, you are not a choker if you miss a potentially game-winning shot (in basketball at least), but you are a 'choker' if you lose a game from a winning position. So the winning team plays safe, the losing team goes for it and we end up with far more overtimes than chance suggests should be the case.

I'd love to see the shooting percentages for game-tying shots as opposed to game-winning shots. My hunch says people shoot a higher percentage with a chance to tie the game than when faced with winning the game (even though that's what we all play out every day throughout our child-hood!!).