Illusion of persistence in NBA 1995-2018 regular season data

Among the sports fans beliefs about “hot hands” and “winning streaks” are widely spread, while the scientific debate about these effects is still ongoing. Recently in a paper by P. Ferreira [Physica A 500: 92-96] detrended fluctuation analysis was applied to the NBA teams’ win records. It was shown that 28 considered NBA teams exhibit persistence in the win record time series. In this paper we take the same data set and compare the obtained results against various random models. We find that the empirical results are consistent with the results obtained from various simple random models.