Yesterday night (or earlier today, for some), the Miami Heat beat Boston Celtics to win the Eastern Conference final of the NBA, thus qualifying for the ultimate showdown against the Denver Nuggets. The Heat made it in the seventh game after both teams had tied at 3-3.
In many ways, the matchup has been a nightmare that threw sports analysts and Las Vegas for a complete spin. For those who missed the plot, Celtics were the pre-series favourites but lost the first three matches to the Heat. The Heat obtained the momentum to make the fourth win for a sweep but lost the next three games and gave the momentum back to the Celtics. And the Celtics, not knowing that they have this thing called momentum, lost cheaply against the Heat.
The momentum of sports
Momentum is a term borrowed from physics, defined as the product of mass and velocity, a parameter with magnitude and direction. Journalists use it to represent some internal force of nature (psychology) that moves entities (sports teams, stock prices) to one direction based on their immediate past performances.
Momentum, like a hot hand, positive energy and negative energy, is a type of cognitive illusion. An argument that is often used to explain a complex or a random process. While hot hands may be partially explainable as it happens due to someone’s mood or a form on a day, this momentum thing happens over a few days. The three-match stretch may appear to you like a sequence, but each game breaks for 45 hours before the next one; most professional teams recover from such setbacks. And every game becomes a new matchup, unconnected to the previous; like a coin toss.
One can argue it was a reverse momentum that happened in this series. The fourth match became the must-win for the Celtics. And as it happened several times in the past two years, they successfully dragged themselves out of the hole, not once, but three times. Then it became a must-win for the Heat (well, also for the Celtics), which they successfully executed.
