Fantastic comment! In fact, it seems that sports games, or at least NBA games, can be described accurately and consistently using (slightly modified) random wal

Fantastic comment! In fact, it seems that sports games, or at least NBA games, can be described accurately and consistently using (slightly modified) random walks. Put differently: Outcomes are indeed random and there's not much machine learning you can do here. Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.2825 https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.2825 And here's a slightly more exciting description of a talk one of the authors gave on that topic at UMass Amherst last year: https://www.physics.umass.edu/seminars/statistics-of-basketball-scoring-and-lead-changes https://www.physics.umass.edu/seminars/statistics-of-basketb... EDIT: I was too stupid to realize that the paper linked above actually supports the parent's opinion, i.e. the idea that successful predictions are statistical artifacts, contrary to what I was thinking earlier.