The NBA Stats Thread: The 15-year chain reaction that led to the NBA's current offensive explosion

PMatic said:
Too many games: The NBA's injury problem is a scheduling one

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/16009898/nba-injury-problem-scheduling-one

Even got Kobe of all people saying the season needs to be shortened. Kobe stans rolling over in their graves.
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Oh boy.
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Some of them were sooo adamant that LeBron was just soft when he said that a couple years ago. A real warrior like Kobe would never want a shorter season.
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I need help. During the summer, I will be having some workouts/skill development sessions with my Middle School team. However, I think I need to add a classroom element to the training as well. Just so the kids can look at basketball from an educational standpoint.

I am thinking about a basketball geometry class as well as advanced stats (basketball math). What are some "must cover" elements of analytics that I need to make sure I put in my sessions. Please respond

I gave a basic, "How to read a Box Score" course with them during the season and that went well. I want to take it a little further though
 
Since they're 12-15 years old you probably don't want to get too deep into advanced stats. Maybe just some basics like PER, on court/off court splits, TS%, etc.
 
Just to recap what I did during the season, it was a day in which the gym was occupied so I wasn't able to use it.

So we did some conditioning and I gave them a box score of a game and asked the following questions.

1. What stands out to you? (Positive or Negative)

They know how I think so none of them mentioned the highest scorer. People mentioned turnovers, assists, free throws, etc.

2. Taught them rebounding % (Off and Def)

3. Taught them BASIC efficiency formula (Not PER)

(Pts + Rebs + *** + Stl + Blocks) - (TOs + Missed FG + Missed FT)

I want to have fun with this so I am really looking for some ideas.

I can even scan some of their work once we start things up next week.
 
I'd focus more on language/terminology. Showing what diff cuts/slides are called offensively and defensively. The kind of screens, and cuts off screens from there. I never got that as a kid, just pick here, cut there, no actual "examples" of those plays.
 
CP1708 said:
I'd focus more on language/terminology. Showing what diff cuts/slides are called offensively and defensively. The kind of screens, and cuts off screens from there. I never got that as a kid, just pick here, cut there, no actual "examples" of those plays.
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Thanks, I am going to move this conversation to the coaches thread. I don't want to clutter this one up if it goes away from the analytics.
 
PMatic said:
NBA Landscape Altered by Barrage of 3-Point Shots

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When Reggie Miller entered the NBA in 1987 as a skinny rookie with a high-arcing jump shot, about 1 of every 18 field-goal attempts in the league was a 3-pointer. This season, 3-pointers represented almost 1 of every 4 shots taken.

Miller broke Larry Bird’s rookie record for 3-pointers made, with 61. He laughs at that number now.

“Today, Steph Curry, he gets that in a month,” Miller said in a phone interview.

Evidence of the steadily rising influence of the 3-pointer can be seen across the basketball landscape. Teams averaged a record 20 attempts a game this season, and the trend is pushing steadily upward, or outward, really, far from the basket and beyond the line painted 23 feet 9 inches away.

Golden State’s Stephen Curry set a league record with 272 3-pointers this season. Two teams, the Knicks and the Houston Rockets, attempted more 3s than any other NBA teams in history.

All are in the playoffs, where the 3-point shot, a novelty when it began in the NBA in 1979, is the star attraction. Some see it as something like art.

“Did you see the Warriors and Denver the other night?” asked Chris Mullin, who, like Miller, began his career in the 1980s and is in the Hall of Fame. The Warriors tied their first-round series with the Nuggets on Tuesday, 1-1, while trying 25 3-pointers among 79 field-goal attempts. Golden State made 14 of them and cruised to a 131-117 win.

“That was beautiful,” Mullin said. “It was even more beautiful because they were making them. But, still, you’re playing, you’re getting up and down, you’re running and you’re passing. That’s the game, to me.”

Other parts of the postseason have been similarly punctuated by the exclamation point of the drained 3-pointer — as crowd-provoking as a dunk, but worth 50 percent more on the scoreboard. On Wednesday, the Rockets and the Oklahoma City Thunder both tried 35 3-pointers — 40 percent of the total shots — in Game 2 of their series. The Thunder made 11, the Rockets made 10, and Oklahoma City won by 3 points to take a 2-0 series lead.

The Knicks, who took more than a third of their shots in the regular season from behind the 3-point line — they established league records for made 3-pointers (891) and attempts (2,371) — took a 2-0 lead on Boston as nine Knicks attempted at least one 3-pointer. That sort of across-the-roster barrage was unheard-of only a few years ago.

“That’s pretty much what we do,” Knicks Coach Mike Woodson said this month. “They’re not bad shots. You’ve got guys who can make them. If I didn’t have players who could make them, trust me, I wouldn’t be shooting them. We’ve got a bunch of guys who can make the 3, and we’ve shot it with high percentages this year. When you’ve got them, you’ve got to take them.”

The 3-point line was borrowed from the American Basketball Association, the footloose ’70s-era rival to the staid NBA.

The league was an offense-happy one. In 1975-76, the last season before the two leagues merged, A.B.A. teams averaged 112.5 points per game. The NBA average was 104.3.

The NBA imported most of the A.B.A. stars and four of its franchises: the Denver Nuggets, the Indiana Pacers, the San Antonio Spurs and the New York (later New Jersey) Nets. Also hoping to import some of the A.B.A.’s attitude, it added the 3-point line for the 1979-80 season.

It was largely a gimmick. Even in the freewheeling A.B.A.’s final season, 3-pointers represented only about 1 of every 25 field-goal attempts. They were used in desperation, not as inspiration.

In the NBA’s first season with a 3-point line, overall scoring actually dropped slightly. The average team attempted only 2.8 3-pointers per game, or about 1 of every 33 shots from the field.

When the Philadelphia 76ers won the 1982-83 NBA championship, they shot a total of 109 3-pointers (they made 25) during the 82-game regular season.

It was not until the 1986-87 season that NBA teams averaged more than one made 3-pointer per game.

“Probably my first 10 or 12 years, the whole thing for every team was that you had to pound it inside,” said Miller, who played 18 with the Pacers. “You had to get it to your center. You had to establish the paint first. And the center position really is gone in the NBA., and in college, really. Gone are the days of a David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Shaquille O’Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, Rik Smits, Alonzo Mourning.”

Teams, historically built around the center, began to turn themselves inside out behind the shooting touch of big men like Dirk Nowitzki of the Dallas Mavericks. Slowly, power forwards within a couple of inches of 7 feet began to hover near the 3-point line, pulling defenders with them.

The rise of the “stretch 4,” as power forwards who play mostly far from the basket are called, may have propelled the proliferation of the 3-pointer more than anything. The defensive slogs of the 1990s gave way to persistent motion and more long jumpers. Defend too close, and the shooter has more room to drive past. Stay too far back, and he has room to shoot something that, in the case of Curry, he makes about 45 percent of the time.

“It’s an exciting brand of basketball,” said Mark Jackson, Golden State’s coach, who played point guard for 17 years in the NBA “ Who wants to see a point guard back down for 20 seconds? It’s a different game. It’s much more enjoyable — talking as someone who did that.”

It has helped raise scoring, which dropped to 91.6 points per game in 1998-99, to about 100 points per game — still 10 points shy of the averages in the 1980s.

A growing ratio of those points comes from 3-pointers. Making them was never the issue. While it took a few seasons to find the shooting form, success on 3-point attempts have been above 30 percent every season since 1986-87. For more than two decades, it has settled around 35 percent. This season, the field-goal percentage for 3-pointers was 35.9, typical of the past 10 years.

What has changed markedly is the number of attempts. They have risen steadily.

Coaches have found that the 3-pointer can be a more efficient way of scoring points — far more so than midrange 2-point jumpers. In the simplest terms, making one-third of your 3-point shots adds up the same as making half of your 2-point shots.

The Knicks made 37.6 percent of their 3-point shots, and 48.7 percent of their 2-point attempts. Their total output (minus free throws) would seem to rise when they shot more from behind the arc than within it.

But that can be a fickle way of scoring, undermined by streaky shooting — a potential downfall in a taut playoff series. But coaches worry about that less than ever, since rosters are filled with 3-point threats. The Rockets and the Knicks, for example, each had more than 10 players average more than one 3-point attempt a game in the regular season — and more than 10 who made more than 30 percent of them.

The two teams had a combined eight players with more 3-pointers made than what Miller had 25 years ago, when he broke the rookie record.

Miller retired in 2005 with an NBA-record 2,560 3-pointers. Ray Allen, now with Miami, has since moved into the top spot. Miller laughed when considering whether he was simply ahead of his time, now that the NBA seems to have fully adopted his long-range game.

“If I would have played in the last five years,” Miller said, “Ray would never have passed me.”
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Link

I think over the next few years, we'll see the three being taken even more, like one of every three shots will be a three point attempt.
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Antidope said:
One of every three? That's too much IMO. Care to explain why?
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PMatic said:
It's just the direction I see the league moving in, with smarter and more complex defenses. Will need the three ball to help spread the floor and create lanes to get to the basket.
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Hello:

The 3-point explosion is not new, though it is accelerating. The NBA smashes the all-time record for 3-point attempts every season. A full 31 percent of shots have come from deep this season, up from 28.5 percent last season and a positively charming 24 percent in 2012-13. It is not stopping anytime soon.
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http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/18408222/zach-lowe-nba-scoring-explosion
 
@ESPNStatsInfo Isaiah Thomas scored at least 15 points in the 4th quarter for the 10th time this season.
That's twice as many as any other player.
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@ESPNStatsInfo Isaiah Thomas is now averaging 10.5 points per game in the 4th quarter this season, most by a player in the last 20 years.
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@MichaelVPina Isaiah Thomas now ranks 3rd in Offensive Real Plus-Minus (behind Harden and Westbrook), and 441st in Defensive Real Plus-Minus (dead last).
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