Your team is losing by one point at halftime? Perfect.

While I was reading Daniel Pink’s book “ When “, he presented an interesting idea — if a basketball team is losing by one point at halftime, they have a better chance of winning than if they were ahead by one point instead.

If it’s more than one point, the numbers start to shift rather quickly. A team winning by 10 points at the half clearly has an edge. It’s the single point games that are interesting, though.

The idea is fairly simple. In a basketball game that still has a half to go, one point is virtually meaningless. However, one team will feel just a tiny bit bad about losing and will work a little harder than the other, and win those games more often than you’d expect.

Really?

When I read that info in Pink’s book, I questioned it at first. However, there is a ton of data to back it up.

There have been a handful of studies around this topic, and all have come to the same conclusion (though to slightly differing degrees). This one studied 18,000 NBA games from 1993–2009, and this one looked at 45,529 NCAA basketball games between 1999–2009 and they both agreed that losing by one point at halftime is a slight advantage.

I don’t suspect this would work if you intentionally gave up a basket right before the buzzer to fall behind by one, but if your team worked hard and kept the game super close, that slight deficit is actually a nice little advantage.

Originally published at https://www.mickmel.com on August 24, 2022.