Researching Defense?

I can't remember where I saw a link to this, but it has been sitting on my firefox tab list for a while waiting for me to link to it. This is hilarious: in the early 90s, someone did a study comparing "undergraduates" opinion of the better defense (hand-waving/stationary) against actual shooting accuracy for those defenses (and control of none). This is only an abstract, so I can't pull apart the methods like I would like to. Undergrads? Come on...everyone should know it is harder to see through a stationary object (wall) than a moving one (like looking through a fan)....except for whatever 140 people they polled. When playing, there's plenty of other moving distractions, aside from whatever your defender is doing, that good shooters don't notice the distraction. But, if you can't see the hoop, things get a little harder (duh):

I'm curious what is meant by the authors that opinions were independant of exposure to basketball. Watching or also playing?

Then, the shooting competition? Again, I wish I could see the full methods. For starters, though, what kind of shots are these (and who is shooting them) where the average FG% without any hand in the face was under 40%? Maybe they were recording shots during "game-action" but regular players should be able to hit free throw range and in well over 50% of the time, and I wouldn't expect them to test beyond the arc. But, if they had random people doing the shooting, I'd expect the variances to be much higher, showing a spread of abilities (the near similar values are fishy to me). Showing that it is "linear" for those "x-inputs" is pretty funny. ...at least the results meet what I'd expect as far as what has the higher percentage:


I've gotta look around the internets to see if I can find other work by these authors...

Well, at the lead-author's 2001 Arizona State research page, it says the (1993) abstract is in preparation. hmmm...

Looks like the lead author is still looking at interfering with shooting.

Given that this author is a researcher AND into sports, he's OK in my book. I'm sure that abstract has all kinds of details behind the scenes or it was an undergrad project...makes for good fodder for reading as-is. Plus, he's at the granter of my Master's degree, so that gives him another bonus. Go Devils!