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Stat Central: NBA Shooting Stats And Tendencies

By Mika Honkasalo

Nov 11, 2013; Philadelphia, PA, USA; San Antonio Spurs guard Manu Ginobili (20) shoots a jump shot during the second quarter against the Philadelphia 76ers at Wells Fargo Center. Mandatory Credit: Howard Smith-USA TODAY Sports
Nov 11, 2013; Philadelphia, PA, USA; San Antonio Spurs guard Manu Ginobili (20) shoots a jump shot during the second quarter against the Philadelphia 76ers at Wells Fargo Center. Mandatory Credit: Howard Smith-USA TODAY Sports /
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During the past few years the emphasis on 3-point shooting in the NBA has been steadily increasing as the NBA is getting smarter as a whole about shot selection. 3-pointers, especially from the corner just are much more valuable than mid-range jumpers. Considering that the league shoots 3s at only a 4 percent lower success rate than mid-range jumpers and they are 50 percent more valuable when you make them, the math is pretty obvious.

Defenses are of course trying to adapt to this and take away some of those analytical goodies like the corner 3, free throws and shots at the rim, but based on what the Houston Rockets just did you can pretty much exclusively only take 3s instead of mid-range jumpers if you want. The Rockets only shot 5.7 percent of their shots from mid-range (not near the rim but within the  3-point line), per NBA.com. Which is less than one in 17 shots and by far the least in the entire NBA.

The publicly available data for some of the more accurate shooting stats only goes back to the 2000-01 season, but even from that time there have been some significant changes in shooting tendencies. Below are charts created based on information from Basketball-Reference.com.

 Percentage of Shots Taken by Distance

NBA Shot Tendencies Based on Distance. Per Basketbal--Reference.com. Created by: Mika Honkasalo. CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE
NBA Shot Tendencies Based on Distance. Per Basketbal–Reference.com. Created by: Mika Honkasalo. CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE /

The chart above shows the steady increase of shots from 10 to 16 feet and 16 feet to 3 decreasing while the amount of 3-pointers has significantly. In relative terms the NBA shoots more than 40 percent more three pointers compared to the early 2000s. There’s a bit of an odd uptick from three to 10 feet and a corresponding downward hit in shots from zero to three feet from the 2009-10 to 2010-11 season. This is probably due to measurements, since the changes are the same amount (and the correct trends seem to show themselves after those jumps); meaning that the NBA has actually decreased shots from 3-10 feet and increased them near the rim.

If you account for that funny mistake in measurement, what’s notable is that the NBA is moving toward less parity in what sorts of shots it’s taking; Shown by the fact that the end off the lines are further from one another than in the beginning.

The NBA hasn’t hit a point of diminishing returns either as illustrated by this graph showcasing the increases in 3-point shooting efficiency over the past 34 seasons.

CLICK TO ENLARGE. The Development of Three Point Percentage. Created by: Mika Honkasalo
CLICK TO ENLARGE. The Development of Three Point Percentage. Created by: Mika Honkasalo /

The NBA shortened the 3-point line from 1994-95 to 1996-97, which shows up on the chart as an outlier, but otherwise percentages in the past 15 years or so have stayed the same despite the increase in amounts. Basically NBA players are jacking it up more and becoming better shooters at a rate which allows the league average to say the same from year to year.

Free throw rates are actually down over the past 10 years by nearly 20 percent, which is something the NBA has obviously focused on in order to improve the pace of the game (especially for the viewers). So despite people complaining about how soft the game is and how everything is a foul now, free throw attempts have decreased.

There’s this notion of that players have forgotten the “art of the mid-range game”, which is statistically sort of invalid. Shooting percentages from mid-range have stayed the same over the past 15 seasons, it’s just that the amount of attempts have gone down.

That’s actually really smart change in tendency shown by the NBA, as illustrated here by Kirk Goldsberry of Grantland.com. The difficulty of hitting an even relatively short 2-pointer in not that much more difficult for an NBA player as hitting a 3, which is why you should opt to shoot as many 3s as possible.

To wrap it all up, the point here is that the NBA doesn’t actually shoot better or worse from anywhere except for the increase in player’s skills to hit 3-pointers. The payoff for hitting a 3 is so much more than hitting a 2, and there’s some data pointing to contested 3s actually being more valuable than mid-range shots, which is a sort of problem because then you don’t have an incentive to try and shoot long 2s at all.

The NBA is seriously looking at this and talking about eliminating corner 3s or adding a 4-point line in order to combat these changes in shooting tendencies; of course you’d want a reward structure for shooting the ball that doesn’t push you toward shooting from just one or two locations. Every solution has ripple effects that can’t be determined and it’ll be interesting to see how NBA players continue to develop as shooters and how the league will react to it.