How NBA Fans Cost Their Teams at the Free-Throw Line

Among the research showcased this week at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston—where sports nerds gather each year to parse stats in Talmudic detail—is a paper titled “Effort vs. Concentration: The Asymmetric Impact of Pressure on NBA Performance.” Behind the cryptic name is strong evidence that basketball fans have it all wrong when it comes to free-throw shooters.

Standard behavior at most college and NBA games is to make a ruckus when a player from the opposing team is at the line and to hush for players from the home team. The idea is that noise is a distraction while silence makes room for focus; the higher the stakes, the louder the ruckus or the deeper the hush. But the paper’s authors found that NBA players shoot markedly worse in pressure situations at home than they do on the road. According to Justin Rao and Matt Goldman, this is likely because the fans have it exactly backwards when it comes to adding and easing pressure.