Does the ball lie? Testing the Rasheed Wallace hypothesis

Brian Meehan, Portillo Javier E. () and Jenkins Corey
Additional contact information
Portillo Javier E.: B.I. Moody III College of Business Administration, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA, USA
Jenkins Corey: Campbell School of Business, Berry College, Mount Berry, 30149-9707, GA, USA

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, 2022, vol. 18, issue 2, 87-95

Abstract: Former NBA all-star forward Rasheed Wallace popularized the catchphrase “Ball Don’t Lie.” Rasheed would often shout this after an opponent missed a free throw. It was used by Rasheed to illustrate the mental impact on a free throw shooter from knowing the foul was questionable and its impact on likelihood of converting the ensuing free throw. The tendency to miss free throws associated with questionable foul calls—or the propensity for the ball to miss—would be followed by Rasheed’s “Ball Don’t Lie!” exclamation. This paper aims to test whether the ball was less likely to go through the hoop during free throws following questionable foul calls. We use a proxy to identify the questionableness of a foul call, one that Rasheed Wallace was very familiar with—whenever the original shooting foul was immediately followed by a technical foul. This proxy is meant to capture player and coach reactions to a shooting foul call. If the call was bad, or questionable, we expect more outrage from the team the foul was called on, which tends to draw technical fouls. Our findings do not support Rasheed’s prediction; the propensity to make a shooting foul free throw does not appear to change after a technical. In fact, using a subset of our data period under which the NBA changed technical foul rules to target complaining about foul calls, we find a small increase in free throw percentage after a technical foul call.

Keywords: free throw shooting; inequity aversion; success under pressure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/jqas-2020-0020 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bpj:jqsprt:v:18:y:2022:i:2:p:87-95:n:3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/jqas/html

DOI: 10.1515/jqas-2020-0020

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports is currently edited by Mark Glickman

More articles in Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().