Are women more likely to choke in sports than men? WNBA players free throw % drops more than NBA players in big spots

Is the difference statistically significant?

It kind of makes sense to me as women are more emotional than men so might they 'feel the big moment' a bit more than a man?

I would guess it's just a statistical anomaly. No reason for a WNBA player to get nervous, it's not like anybody's watching.

You can't choke if you're not good anyway, unless you're a he/she competing with women.

Fact: Men don't pace as well as women do in the marathon. They must be chokers.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4289124/

My guess would be that WNBA players always try hard, and do drop off a bit due to fatigue or nerves near the end of the game. NBA guys (like a Shaq) might not care about free throws early in the game, but then will focus more near the end of the game. Thus less of a drop off in the NBA.

more emotional = more chokes? wrote:

I was reading an article on choking and found the following stat to be fascinating.

The Guardian wrote:

Elite athletes are like the rest of us: they get anxious and it hampers their performance. In the last 30 seconds of tight basketball games, WNBA and NBA players are 5.8% and 3.1% respectively less likely to score from a free throw – an uncontested shot awarded to players who have been fouled – than at other moments in the game.

It kind of makes sense to me as women are more emotional than men so might they 'feel the big moment' a bit more than a man?

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/nov/05/under-pressure-why-athletes-choke

An alternative explanation is that because the WNBA ball is bouncier than the NBA ball, they both choke, and by the same amount, but the differences in the ball exacerbate errors by the women (e.g. the ball bounces out when it hits the rim or backboard more often). This may or may not be the main effect. I do suspect the result is significant statistically (otherwise we wouldn't really expect the 3.1% difference by the men to be statistically significant).

It's not a women v.s. men thing. It's a performance /fitness thing. The less fit you are, the more inconsistent you are. You see it in HS xc all the time - top girls seem very inconsistent compared to top guys (on a state / county level) and then when you compare the top girls to the JV guys that have similar times, the consistency is similar.

This is all anecdotal but I'd love to do a study on it or hear if anyone has some data to back it up.

No. We are all watching cute soccer girls

epicTCK wrote:

It's not a women v.s. men thing. It's a performance /fitness thing. The less fit you are, the more inconsistent you are. You see it in HS xc all the time - top girls seem very inconsistent compared to top guys (on a state / county level) and then when you compare the top girls to the JV guys that have similar times, the consistency is similar.

This is all anecdotal but I'd love to do a study on it or hear if anyone has some data to back it up.

Spot on. A top girl that runs like 18:00 and has an “off day” might run 19:20, which seems like a much bigger drop than a 16:00 guy having a comparable “off day” of like 16:30

NBA players play 82 games per regular season, plus up to 28 games per postseason. WNBA players play 36 games per regular season, plus up to 28 games per postseason.

NBA players have more practice shooting free throws in high-pressure settings than WNBA players. So it's not a surprise they do it better.

Since WNBA players make an overall higher proportion of their foul shots than NBA players, this means that players in both leagues do about the same in clutch end-of-game situations.

By the way, at the end of the game which players are getting fouled? It's not the dead-eye foul shooters.

Lot of profoundly lonely dudes on here overcompensating on a running message board.

more emotional = more chokes? wrote:

I was reading an article on choking and found the following stat to be fascinating.

The Guardian wrote:

Elite athletes are like the rest of us: they get anxious and it hampers their performance. In the last 30 seconds of tight basketball games, WNBA and NBA players are 5.8% and 3.1% respectively less likely to score from a free throw – an uncontested shot awarded to players who have been fouled – than at other moments in the game.

It kind of makes sense to me as women are more emotional than men so might they 'feel the big moment' a bit more than a man?

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/nov/05/under-pressure-why-athletes-choke

I’d argue there could be other things at play — such as who shoots the FTs. The NBA’s game has evolved to pace & space, they often take out big men in the final minutes. So only guards and good FT shooters are shooting. In the WNBA games I’ve watched, they still play with traditional bigs and therefore the composition of the shooters must be evaluated.

What would be more interesting to me to compare this stat across positions.

Players are more fatigued in the last 30 seconds of a game, particularly a tight game where coaches tend to leave their best players in longer.