Thanks for the chart. It's very interesting to see these results gathered for comparison.
Sets of numbers always invite cherry-picking of results, and I tempted to say that the fact that the Hoyas are 9-1 over the last four years in 1 & 2 point games isn't obviously meaningful in a statistical sense.
Take another equal-sized range in your chart, games decided by 6 & 7 points: Georgetown is a disturbing 5 out of 16 in those games, or 31%, more than forty points under its overall average of 74%.
Is that as meaningful as the fact that the team is 90% in 1 & 2 point games? Seems like it should be, since it's the same-sized range of possibilities. We could construct some kind of explanation, I guess, but the more likely reason is just the randomness of distribution. The statistician's answer would likely be that the 1 & 2 point games are merely more memorable, not more meaningful.
And yet . . . you're on to the fact that it's getting to be a pretty big sample of games for our seniors, and something
feels significant about the team's ability to win close games.
Horse-racing has a term, "on the nod," to describe how one of two essentially even horses wins at the end. On the stride, one goes ahead by a nose, and then on the next stride the other goes ahead. The one that wins--is on the nod--when the finish line comes up ought to be random. But the best jockeys get far more than their random share of the nods. They have some almost magical ability to feel the approaching finish line and get the rhythm of their horses into the winning nod.
The end of a close basketball game is like a horse race won on the nod--the buzzer at the end of the game like the finish line--and this group of seniors and their coach at Georgetown have had too much luck to call it luck at winning close games. That talent doesn't help them when they're six or seven points back, but it pulls out games that, statistically, they should have lost.
