TrueHoop: Phil Jackson on big-game mentality

[tesseractive]

A few years ago, Justin Rao and Matt Goldman presented research about how players perform in big moments. Rao's mom, as it happens, is an expert in psychology. With some advice from her, Rao and Goldman separated the tasks of a hoops game into categories that have emerged in brain research: Things that require quiet concentration (like shooting free throws), and things that require exertion and effort (like offensive rebounding).

In a nuts , they found exactly what psychologists would have expected them to find: That special efforts -- Game 7 kind of efforts, along the lines of "wanting it more" -- help with those exertion-based tasks like rebounding.

But those same special efforts hurt performance when doing things that require a quiet mind. The key finding was that in big moments, it's the home-team players who tend to miss free throws as the pressure mounts. For the road team, it's routine -- all those people screaming want you to lose. The home players, though, they are wired to want so badly to delight those 20,000 fans sitting so close and quietly. That special big-moment urge to doeven better than normal keeps the players from calmly stepping to the line like it's the most normal thing in the world.

http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/pos...-on-big-game-m

[Phenomanul]

And yet home teams have won the majority of Game 7s....

[41times]

Mentality is one thing but home teams win 14 of 17 game 7's
So you have to do the work on the court and you have to get some fortunate bounces if you are the road team