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Nerves are supposed to matter.

The pressure gauge is turned way up during the playoffs. Players sweat more. They feel the import of every situation, knowing their legacies are on the line. Each moment is more grueling, since one mistake could lead to early elimination and whisk away the Larry O'Brien Trophy.

Maybe.

There's also a chance players don't even feel the pressure, since they're so used to these situations. Every NBA player has felt the stakes rise at some point during his basketball career, and ramping it up further might not actually impact anyone's performance.

To look at this objectively, we'll turn to free throws. As Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim explained in the book Scorecasting while using shots from the stripe to analyze home-court advantage, those are the most isolated and telling events in basketball:

"Free throws are an isolated interaction between one player—the shooter—and the crowd that is trying to distract and heckle him. Also, all free-throw shots are standardized; they are taken from the same distance of 15 feet at a basket standing 10 feet high, regardless of where the game is played.

"Over the last two decades in the NBA, including more than 23,000 games, the free-throw percentage of visiting teams is 75.9 percent and that of the home teams is...75.9 percent—identical even to the right of the decimal point. Are these shooting percentages any different at different points in the game, say, during the fourth quarter or in overtime, when the score is tied? No. Even in close games, when home fans are trying their hardest to distract the opponents and exhort the home team, the percentages are identical."

The same theory holds true here, indicating that nerves might actually not matter too much during the postseason.

Teams shot 77.2 percent from the line during the regular season, and that percentage has actually risen to 77.7 percent in the playoffs. During clutch situations in the postseason—defined by NBA.com as the last five minutes of games featuring a margin no larger than five points—the percentage sits at 75.6 percent. During the larger sample that is the fourth quarter, we're looking at 75.2 percent.

Of course, there are plenty of confounding factors here: the quality of players, for example. But none are bigger than the size of the sample, since even four additional makes would push the clutch percentage above the regular-season mark, and we've seen more than a few intentional misses in late-game situations.

Either way, there's not nearly enough of a dip to indicate players are succumbing to pressure in this most isolated of events.

Verdict: Myth Busted