In a paper submitted to the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, SFI External Professor Aaron Clauset and collaborator Sears Merritt find that scoring rhythms in pro hockey, football, and basketball are remarkably similar.
The researchers analyzed every point scored in every game over a decade of college football, pro football, pro hockey, and pro basketball -- more than 1.25 million scoring events across 40,000-plus games.
Among their findings:
- When it comes to scoring dynamics, football, hockey, and basketball are essentially the same game.
- There is very little correlation between one point and the next. In other words, he found no evidence at all that hot hands or “momentum” exist in any of these sports.
- While hockey and football teams tend to extend their leads, pro basketball squads tend to lose their leads when they’re ahead.
Furthermore, based on observation of a few scoring events and using a mathematical model they developed, Clauset and Merritt were able to predict game outcomes for college and pro football, the NHL, and the NBA -- outperforming betting odds for SportsbookReview.com’s pregame betting odds and more or less matching the accuracy of the live-betting site Bovada.
Read the paper on arXiv (October 16, 2013)
Read the article in Slate (January 2, 2014)
Video: Watch Clauset's lunchtime talk at SFI on scoring dynamics (April 17, 2013)