they get less so.

If you play enough games, you are going to be the hero and the goat on some occasions.

Even the strongest among us have weak moments and the weakest have moments of powerful energized performance.

i am not a basketball person. i am a baseball man and was very much into the advanced numbers long before Moneyball found its way into the big leagues. Bill James, the Godfather of sabermetrics, was the first to address this issue of clutch play and he debunked it. As Pomeroy says in the article above, players in general do concentrate more when the game is on the line.

Michael Jordan has acknowledged that he failed with the game on the line at an expected rate. Jimmer went 3 for 15 from the arc in the biggest game of his life. Had he done just a little better, the Cougars would have advanced to the Elite 8. No one would dare call Jimmer a choke.

Perhaps Jimmermania and Haws eclipsing him has something to do with it. Heck, Collinsworth until this year, couldn't get CBers passed his missed free throw in the Sweet 16 game despite him grabbing 15 rebounds in that game as a true freshman and leading the team in rebounds in each of the last 7 games of that season. KC was hounded on CB all last season as the prime example of a choke.

This year, they have gone after Haws, with about the same skimpy anecdotal data and unsupported intuition. It may be that he has been nervous on a couple of occasions. But he has also been very strong and more often the primary go-to scorer for this team for 3 years.

This issue is so well settled among the cognoscenti that i have had little interest in gathering data on individuals. and a large sample size is needed. i usually ignore the issue here as something promulgated by people dealing with their own human condition. But the Haws attacks have been so wrongheaded. i just scanned data over his entire BYU career and his efficiency down the stretch has been pretty normal.

If there is something to it, the objective stat gurus in the major sports haven't seen anything to prove it. Quite the opposite. They ridicule the proponents of "clutch players." It would be quite the feather in their cap if they could evaluate players on such a characteristic as clutch talent. It would be a source of prestige and money. They haven't been able to do so.

People feel good on some days, lousy on others. Some people shoot better than others.