While I was reading Daniel Pink’s book “When“, he presented an interesting idea — if a basketball team is losing by one point at halftime, they have a better chance of winning than if they were ahead by one point instead.
If it’s more than one point, the numbers start to shift rather quickly. A team winning by 10 points at the half clearly has an edge. It’s the single point games that are interesting, though.
The idea is fairly simple. In a basketball game that still has a half to go, one point is virtually meaningless. However, one team will feel just a tiny bit bad about losing and will work a little harder than the other, and win those games more often than you’d expect.
Really?
When I read that info in Pink’s book, I questioned it at first. However, there is a ton of data to back it up.
There have been a handful of studies around this topic, and all have come to the same conclusion (though to slightly differing degrees). This one studied 18,000 NBA games from 1993-2009, and this one looked at 45,529 NCAA basketball games between 1999-2009 and they both agreed that losing by one point at halftime is a slight advantage.
I don’t suspect this would work if you intentionally gave up a basket right before the buzzer to fall behind by one, but if your team worked hard and kept the game super close, that slight deficit is actually a nice little advantage.
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