Basketball Tournament Pressure Test

A story about how three different teams handled player selection for a crucial free throw shootout, and what happened afterwards.

"We had a basketball tournament with 3 teams, and we all finished with the same record - one win, one loss. To decide who would advance to the finals, we created a free throw shootout where each team had to pick 5 guys to shoot.

My team used a dictatorship approach - I was the dictator since I was injured and coaching. I just picked our 5 best players. The second team did merit-based selection, and the third team used a volunteer voting system.

In the merit-based team, something interesting happened. One of their weaker players made the practice shot while one of their better players missed. They honored the merit system and let the weaker player shoot. He stepped up, made the shot under pressure, and his team advanced to the finals. They went on to win the whole thing.

But afterwards, this guy went up to the better player who sat out and said 'Can you and me go shoot free throws? I want to know if that was the correct statistical decision.' The other guy tried to decline saying 'No man, you already made it, we already won.' But he insisted 'I need to know.'

They ended up shooting, and of course the guy who played basketball his whole life made more free throws with the larger sample size. The winner got kind of bummed out when he saw this. It was such an intelligently stupid thing to do - snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by trying to validate if he made the right statistical decision."