Hot Hand: The Statistics Behind Sports' Greatest Streaks

Upon witnessing a series of outstanding (or awful) performances, a sports fan or announcer may wonder, What are the odds of that happening? In fact, statisticians have shown that, for the most part, athletic streaks occur about as often as would be expected by random chance; if one flipped a coin a thousand times, one would find many "streaks" of several consecutive heads (or tails) along the way. This counterintuitive finding, which implies that the notion of momentum in sports is greatly ...