Momentum is a fickle thing.
Just look at the Miami Heat. Following their loss to the Bulls last Thursday, the outlook in Miami looked grim. After rolling into the All-Star break with a sterling 27-7 record, the mighty Miami crew looked anything but mighty. The Heat lost to the Bulls in overtime, bringing their post-All-Star break record down to a mediocre 13-10.
The Heat appeared to be doomed. In a microwave society that obsessively rushes to judgment after every ebb and flow of daily life, the Heat looked irrecoverably flawed, and the conviction was strong.
Champions don't stumble into the playoffs! They have to get rolling before the postseason or else their cooked! Their great start was a fluke!
That kind of rhetoric sounds well and good, but history tells us a different story: momentum is mostly a load of nonsense.
Much of the analysis we hear leading up to the playoffs tends to have postseason implications. Conventional wisdom suggests that a team must get "playoff-ready" in the final weeks of the season and play its best ball heading into the playoffs. Therefore, the Heat's recent slide revealed more about their title qualifications than anything months ago.
Among the short list of contenders, the Heat have the worst post-All-Star break record of 17-10 (.630). The Spurs have gone on a tear at 21-6, and the Bulls, despite some recent trip-ups, are right behind them in the second-half win column.
But no matter how well Miami or any other team does down the stretch of the regular season, it has virtually nothing to do with what will happen in the playoffs. The more we look at the historical data, the more we find that hot and cold streaks are just that ... streaks.
Here's a summary of the last 15 playoffs:
If you took the top two seeds from each conference and grouped them together, the ones with a losing record over their final 10 games of the regular season went on to win the title as frequently as those who went 9-1 or better. The best "hot" teams entering the playoffs have been no better than the "cold" ones.
• Remember the 2003-04 San Antonio Spurs? They had an 11-game winning streak going into the playoffs, the hottest such stretch in modern times. How'd they do? They lost in the Western Conference semifinals -- the same fate that season of the Sacramento Kings, who finished with a 4-6 record down the stretch.
• Get this: The record over the first 10 games of the regular season has a higher correlation to playoff series wins than the final 10 games of the regular season. What's more? Same thing with first half and second half of the season; the first-half record has a stronger link with postseason success than the second-half W-L.
• If you're looking for a sleeper, don't pay attention to their temperature going in. Of the seven conference finalists seeded third or lower (i.e., underdogs that went far), five of them fared worse in their final 10 games than their overall record. Think 2009-10 Boston Celtics. They finished 3-7 in their final 10 games and it meant nothing.
• More on sleeper picks. Of the 10 underdogs (3-seed or lower) that were blistering hot going into the playoffs (9-1 or better), only one -- the 1997-98 No. 3 Los Angeles Lakers -- reached the conference finals. Six of those 10 got bounced in the first round. Think 2008-09 Portland Trail Blazers. Oh, and that hot Lakers team? Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal got embarrassed by the Utah Jazz in four games in the conference finals that year.
Any way you slice it, the overwhelming takeaway is that momentum doesn't matter nearly as much as we think it does. And we focus on Miami because its 2005-06 championship team might offer the richest lesson of them all.
If you want to see the myth of momentum in action, just watch some tape of Miami's title team. It finished the regular season in disarray, losing three straight games to finish the season with a paltry 4-7 April record heading into the postseason run. People wrote it off faster than you could say Michael Doleac. And what happened? It won the title in six games, coincidentally coming back from an 0-2 deficit.
By no means does this study predict that the Heat will win the championship. That's not the point. What it does tell us is all this talk about how vital momentum is going into the playoffs really is just baseless conjecture. If we use history as a guide, we learn that some title teams came in hot and some title teams came in frigid cold. Some streaking underdogs continued on their runs, but most of them flamed out early.
So if momentum is bunk, what should we focus on? Pay closer attention to matchups and overall record. Too often, we're plagued by the mental bug of recency bias, which causes us to rely on a faulty "What have you done for me lately?" judgment. Instead, we should be asking ourselves more specific questions. Can one team exploit the other's weaknesses? Whose stars are healthy and fully charged? Those have better chances of panning out than busting out the thermometer.
Don't let the natural fluctuations of the season fool you. If the Heat win on Thursday night against the Bulls and extend their win streak to five games, don't waste a breath about its playoff significance. Just like you shouldn't put any weight to the Heat's post-All-Star break downturn. Hot and cold streaks at the end of the regular season don't matter. Teams just need to get hot in the postseason.
Just ask Dwyane Wade.
Statistical support for this story from NBA.com