Los Angeles Lakers – Houston Rockets Brawl: A Case-Study of Information Cascades Within the NBA Community
As an avid fan of professional sports, I commonly find myself frequenting online sports forums. Yesterday, there was an especially large amount of activity on the NBA discussion boards due to an event during the matchup against the Los Angeles Lakers and the Houston Rockets. During the waning moments of the fourth quarter, the game quickly spiraled out of control as a controversial foul call led to a full-on brawl between the two teams.
While it was initially unclear how the situation escalated so quickly, the post-game press conference revealed some insights. Rockets guard Chris Paul alleged that Lakers guard Rajon Rondo spat on his face — an offense to which he responded by throwing a punch (which subsequently began the brawl). However, when Rondo was asked about the allegation, he vehemently denied spitting in Paul’s face.
Because of the lack of substantial evidence supporting either of these two players, some began to theorize that perhaps the spit of Rockets forward Carmelo Anthony (who was standing near Paul and Rondo during this incident) inadvertently found its way onto Paul’s face, a case of “friendly fire” per say. Paul did not realize that the spit unintentionally came from his own teammate, and quickly targeted Rondo as the assailant. And while this theory may seem unlikely to some, it was quickly picked up by popular news outlets and prominent sports analysts on Twitter.
With this situation, we can see an information cascade beginning to form. News outlets and Twitter analysts comprised of the first few people in a sequential decision-making process. Because they were all in agreement in accepting the afore-mentioned theory, a strong high signal was sent to others in the NBA community; this became apparent to me as the friends who I discussed this incident with quickly brought up the “friendly fire” theory. As a result, the NBA community quickly cascaded into accepting this weakly-supported theory.
On a final note, a popular Reddit post this morning showed an enhanced and slowed-down video of the altercation in which spit can clearly be seen leaving Rondo mouth and making its way onto Paul’s face. This Reddit user can be viewed as a “cheater” in the information cascade, as revealing this information quickly broke the cascade and stopped the strong high signal from being transmitted any further. Additionally, we can observe one of the cons of information cascades: that they often times involve false information.
Sources:
https://www.nbcsports.com/bayarea/warriors/did-carmelo-anthony-accidently-cause-rajon-rondo-chris-paul-brawl
https://www.sbnation.com/2018/10/21/18005586/chris-paul-rajon-rondo-fight-spit-spitgate-lakers-rockets-investigation-carmelo-anthony