jz13

Really interesting read, and I agree with most of it.  But I also think you are falling into a very common analytics trap.  You assume you are asking the right question.  The question you're asking, as i understand it, is what is the more efficient SHOT out of contested and uncontested threes and midrange?  The answer to that is clearly pretty much any type of 3.  But there is a more important question.  What distribution of shots provides the most efficient OFFENSE or overall scoring?  The distinction between the best shot and the best offense is critically important.

 

ESPN (I believe it was ESPN, but i can't for the life of me find the article) did an analysis on whether there was a point in which limiting your offense to 3's, paint, and FT actually made the overall offense less efficient.  What they found is after a certain point, there appeared to be a negative correlation to avoiding the dreaded long two at all costs.  Or put another way, the Warriors and Mavs had the most efficient offenses by far, but took a significantly higher percentage of long 2's than the Rockets.  The Rockets are merely in the middle of the pack in terms of offensive efficiency despite their strict adherence to their paint, 3's and FT philosophy.  

 

Two observations about this:

 

1) The person taking the shots matters more than anything.  Steph Curry taking a contested long two is probably more efficient than Beverly taking a wide open 3.  So you may argue, if Curry just eliminated all those long two's he'd be even more efficient.  Perhaps, but we don't have numbers to back that up, and the fact that he's possibly the most efficient volume offensive player in history suggests he might have the balance just right.  His long 2's also open up the offense for his teammates.

 

2) ESPN's analysis passes the gut test.  If a good defensive team knows it only ever has to guard the paint and 3 point line, spacing will become a nightmare over the course of a game.  However, if a team can hit enough midrange two's, it forces the defense to guard a lot more space which will inevitably lead to a higher paint and 3 point efficiency.

 

The bottom line is that focusing too much on individual statistics can often lead to missing the bigger picture.  That doesn't mean analytics isn't really really important - it is - but we should aware of it's limitations.