Mid-range shot; still there in NBA crunch time!
Find out the top mid-range team over the last few years!
Three-point revolution
In just 15 years, basketball's DNA has mutated. It's all about raining threes, thunderous dunks, and acrobatic layups and the mid-range is made from lava.
The “Three-point revolution” is full-blown with its own wikipedia page. Its roots; Steve Nash and Mike D'Antoni's Phoenix Suns.
And the revolution happened with the best shooter of all time as its leader; Steph Curry.
Crunch time eye test
Watching tons of games over all these years, still my eye-test says that top teams when the clock's ticking and the scoreboard's tight, they rely on the mid-range; Steph and Lillard led-teams aside.
Time to dive into the data and check whether my gut-feeling is true or is just me growing up watching basketball in the 90s and 2000s.
Enter Data
I use the following data:
NBA Seasons 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24
All the playoff games of these seasons
Random 15% sample of the regular season games of these seasons
Crunch time
Less than 5 minutes left in the game
Point difference less than 10 points
We keep only the playoffs teams. Playoff teams are the best half of the league essentially. We keep the regular season and playoff games of the teams that every year went to the playoffs.
We keep only made shots.
Crunch time shots - Regular Season
Let’s plot the regular season crunch time shots from the playoff teams!
We see that:
Close to the basket shots (0-4 feet) are the majority: 40% of the total shots
Mid-range (10-16 feet) shots are there too: 9% of the total shots
Crunch time shots - Playoffs
Close to the basket shots are the majority yet in a lower percentage of 36%
Mid-range is increased to 13%
Let’s test
We can actually test whether the distance of crunch time Playoff shots is generally closer than the Regular Season crunch time shots.
I use the Mann-Whitney U one sided test to compare the two distributions of shots. The alternative hypothesis is that the shots of the playoffs are closer in distance than the regular season.
Running the test gives us
effect size: 0.034
p value: 0.04
The effect size for the problem at hand is important and the p-value gives us good confidence.
Yes, the 3 point revolution is here to stay. Yet, in crunch time good teams are shooting from closer during playoff games, and this difference comes mostly from mid-range shots.
It seems the data match the eye-test after all :-)
Top mid-range playoff team
Closing, let’s check what happens on team level. The team with the most made and attempted mid-range shots in tight game situations in playoffs are the New York Knicks with 32/68 shots!
Definitely their top two players the last years, Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle, are mid-range specialists.
Knicks also thought they were relying too much on mid-range. They had the biggest trade of the summer. Now that they got the Karl Anthony Towns “(self-proclaimed) best shooting big ever” and traded Julius Randle, let’s see how their shot selection goes when it truly matters.
2024-25 NBA Season is starting! Let the games begin!
PS. With all due respect to Karl Anthony Towns, I think Dirk and KD are the best shooting bigs ever.