"Turns out players are not streaky; simply flipping a coin produces the same sort of runs of H's and M's. The scientists gleefully explained this result to bask

"Turns out players are not streaky; simply flipping a coin produces the same sort of runs of H's and M's. The scientists gleefully explained this result to basketball pundits; the pundits remained non-plussed and unconvinced. (Surprised?)" Yes, I am surprised. The article makes good points but its fallacy is applying mathematical abstractions to the real world. Now, there are real-world phenomena that are closer to the assumptions made by the dependency assumption in the coin tossing (Bernoulli) trials, e.g. rolling real dice. However, player performance is complex and does depend on previous history; for example a player who did badly in the previous game or missed an important shot will be under pressure this time, which will affect his performance. The model in this case is too simplistic, a Markov model may be a better approach perhaps. However, estimating the Markov order of a given time series is a hard problem.