June 13, 2005
The Spurs won again last night, overcoming the usual psychological difficulties:
"It gets more difficult after a win to come back and understand how that subconscious sort of complacency can set in," said Spurs coach Gregg Popovich. "You can't allow that to happen. You have to keep an appropriate fear of your opponent so that complacency will dissipate as soon as possible."This feels right, but I was kind of surprised the article doesn't bother to do some kind of statistical verification of the claim -- surely Marc Stein has this kind of information at their fingertips, and even if he doesn't, it can't be that hard to obtain. (While he's at it, I'd be interested to know whether the closeness of a loss affects the loser's chances of winning the next game, my hunch being that there should be a significant letdown effect after close losses.)
One of the most incredible things about sports journalism is the facility with which it wield these kinds of basic frequency statistics -- even if all it means is that they have a staff of researchers working behind them. Coaching, by contrast, has a certain mystique, one that outwardly stresses the psychological over the scientific, even if real analytical precision is actually required to go out and win championships. Maybe this is why Stein meant for Popovich's words to stand as wisdom rather than as verifiable claim, even though verifying it would be a cinch.
Yeah, a lot of what passes for conventional wisdom in sports tends to break down you consider actual facts and precedents. But without knowing for sure, I'd say that your hunch about a "close loss" effect on the next game is probably correct.
I think the key to the complacency in the comment relates to the playing of consecutive games against the same team. The development of the notion "we are better, they can't beat us". This conjunction does not occur often during the regular season, once or twice per team per season. I would suspect that over the entire NBA the happenstance of winning or losing after winning probably approaches 50% since the record of the entire NBA is 1230 to 1230. The occurence of consecutive games most often appears in the playoffs. Right now the Spurs are .500 after a win however the home court advantage is 1.000. On the point of a close loss, I think it could be argued many ways. The 30 point loss could be so devastating to be irrecoverable and the close loss could be the challenge (one more loose ball, one less turnover, one more rebound). Just my musings.
Yeah, obviously you can paint a picture that describes just about any reaction, which is why I was asking for some statistical firepower. I do feel pretty strongly about that hunch though, just from my experience with watching NBA playoff series... most NBA teams that are good enough to get in the playoffs get fired up after being blown out.
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