Fun With Numbers
What’s a Good Shot? Part I of II

NBA.com’s HotSpots breaks down field goal shooting by location of shot attempt. Here’s the HotSpots for my Bulls this season:

Chicago Bulls HotSpots Shot Chart, 2008-2009 Season
Bulls Shot Chart

For those seeing HotSpots for the first time, the inner semi-circle statistic represents shots that were scored around the basket. The stats outside the biggest arc represent 3 pointers. And the Bulls are suprisingly really good at those, especially the straight-on 3.

The numbers aren’t perfect. As of today basketball-reference has the Bulls shooting 367/974 from 3-point range, while HotSpots has them at 365/956. But the numbers are close enough across the board to get a sense of what’s what. So let’s take a look at league-wide data, which I’ve converted into eFG% (FG% that awards an extra point for 3’s) by zone. Below is the data for every shot taken in the NBA this season.

Combined Shot Chart of Every NBA Team, 2008-2009 Season
NBA Shot Chart

Organizing that data by distance from the hoop:

3-pointers: 12398/33430 57.1% eFG
Long-twos: 13946/34278 40.1% eFG
Short-jumpers: 8699/22132 39.3% eFG
Close-range: 34030/60670 56.1% eFG

(Note: basketball-reference has league-wide 3PT% at 36.6%, which correlates to a 54.9% eFG. I’ll be using that 54.9% in the next post.)

37.5% of NBA field goal attempts are from “mid-range” (long-twos + short jumpers), yet eFG% on those shots is under 40%. And you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody scoring efficiently from that range - Ray Allen is the best I could find, and he’s hitting at a 52.2% clip.

What about drawing fouls from that range? According to 82games.com, shooting fouls occur on only 2% of mid-range field goal attempts compared to about 17% on close-range attempts.

Makes you wonder why offenses would ever settle for a mid-range shot, much less settle 37.5% of the time. It would make sense that the best offensive teams take a high ratio of shots from efficient zones compared to inefficient zones. We’ll test it out next Monday.

Player of the day: Uwe Blab, career high 46.8 eFG% in 1986

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 2:09 AM and is filed under Fun With Numbers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.