“The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks” by Ben Cohen; Custom House (304 pages, $32.50)
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Some of the best, most engaging and most memorable books challenge a reader’s preconceptions, forcing them not only to think, but asking them to view the world in a way they previously didn’t.
As someone who played basketball (albeit poorly) and now covers it for a living, I have long believed in the so-called “hot hand” — that is, a player getting into an almost supernatural trance, making several shots in a row and therefore increasing their odds of success in future attempts, even as those attempts become more audacious. It’s a facet of the game that has been immortalized in the sport’s language and in popular culture, from movies to video games.
It’s that belief made me so intrigued by Ben Cohen’s recently released book, “The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks,” and why, 70 pages into it, I became unreasonably angered when it was suggested that the hot hand doesn’t exist. How could such sacrilege make its way onto the pages of a widely distributed piece of nonfiction?
What transpired beyond that point, though, was what helped make Cohen’s first book such a captivating one. Gradually, as anecdote after anecdote and study after study was presented, I found my views changing. Perhaps I had been wrong all these years. Maybe the hot hand was destined to join such things as Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and Theranos in the mental bin of things I once believed to be real at a more naive time in my life.
Part of the beauty of the book is that it’s constantly evolving. Rather than laying out a thesis statement in the first chapter and building a case until the book’s final page, it broadens its scope with each example it presents. Just as the reader begins to gain what they think is a clear and firm sense of what the hot hand is, new facts and stories arise that either counteract it or deepen the understanding of it.
This quality comes, in part, from a book that extends its gaze far beyond basketball. Sure, it begins by highlighting the work of two people who have embodied the hot hand in the sport — Steph Curry, the Golden State Warriors’ prodigious sharp-shooter, and Mark Turmell, the man who programmed and designed the popular arcade game NBA Jam, in which players would be “on fire” (with a flaming ball and all) if they made three shots in a row — but it ventures well past those two men.
There’s the example of William Shakespeare, who wrote three of his most famous plays in a two-month stretch in which he was holed up while England dealt with the plague (a predicament that has suddenly become much more relatable). There’s Rob Reiner, who directed three movies with A-plus CinemaScore grades, making him the only director to have three such films, in a span of just five years.
Through stories like these, the book demonstrates that there’s a complex, layered quality to the hot hand that goes beyond a basketball player seeing the ball go in three or four times in a row. It’s a principle that applies to, among many aspects of life featured in the book, business, science, literature, film, gambling, and even American immigration policy and beet farming. The hot hand, as Cohen writes, is “not a random occurrence. It’s the collision of talent, circumstance, and even a little bit of luck.”
The book is seldom a straightforward one, which is understandable given its nuanced subject. At times, though, its anecdotes can meander, leading a reader to wonder what the larger point is and what tie to the hot hand it has, even if it eventually emerges. It can also be a bit dense at certain points, but it stands, more than anything else, as an occupational hazard of a book that has to synthesize lengthy, rigorous academic studies.
The endnotes and bibliography speak to that extensive research, with that section spanning a whole 25 pages, tiny print and all. Benjamin Cohen, a sports writer for the “Wall Street Journal” who excels at tackling previously unexplored and utterly fascinating topics, also makes some of the drier parts of the book more digestible by employing a sharp wit. He uses it effectively throughout the book, weaving together a tale that reflects the changing mindset around the veracity of the hot hand.
Conventional wisdom, for quite some time, dictated that there was one. It’s a product of human psychology. We often see patterns where they don’t exist and craft elaborate explanations for why they do. That illusion was shattered by a seminal 1985 paper from psychologists Amos Tversky, Thomas Gilovich, and Robert Vallone, who conducted a questionnaire of basketball fans and paired it with the records of players from the 1980-81 Philadelphia 76ers.
For decades, their conclusions were widely accepted to the point of being gospel, but, without fully spoiling the book’s ending, they were questioned in recent years with studies that reshaped the way the hot hand is considered by psychologists, statisticians and economists. As Cohen noted in the book’s final sentence, there’s a beauty in that. “The debate wasn’t nearly over yet,” he wrote. “Maybe it never will be. And isn’t that the best part?”
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