Month: May 2018

The rise of the three-point jump shot in the NBA has been well documented. Over the past five regular seasons the average team three-point attempt rate has spiked from 24.3% to 33.7%, per basketball-reference. The analytically driven Houston Rockets actually attempted more three-pointers than two-pointers this past season!

In this three-point happy league, analyzing an individual game after removing the effects of “hot” or “cold” three-point shooting can be very informative. It allows us to see how well the teams played in all aspects of the game except three-point accuracy. We can strip aside a particularly unusual shooting performance and observe the “fundamentals” of a game, in a certain sense.  This is what Three-Pointer Independent Game Score (abbreviated as 3-PIGS) does.

Continue reading “Introducing 3-PIGS, a New Way of Understanding Three-Point Variability in NBA Games”

I recently was building a simple model to forecast an NBA playoffs series. As I was building the model, I realized that I was not taking into account the possibility that each team’s strength could change over the course of the series. If a team dominates games 1 and 2, we might reasonably expect them to have a higher likelihood of winning game 3 than we did at the beginning of the series.

But perhaps we should not alter out initial belief too much. After all, the 2 games in the example above is not a very large sample. Sheer randomness and recency bias may be causing us to shift our thinking too much. My initial hunch was just that; the general public overreacts too much to a few performances.

Continue reading “Are Past Games in a Playoff Series Predictive of the Next Game?”

The appropriately named “2-for-1” is a strategy utilized at the end of a quarter in which a team tries to time their shot attempts so that, as the name suggests, they get two attempts while their opponents only have one. To execute the strategy, a team usually pushes the ball up the floor to take a shot with about 30 seconds left in the quarter, thus ensuring that their opponents cannot hold for the last shot.

Intuitively, this strategy seems perfectly reasonable. Just like holding for the last shot, a team which executes the 2-for-1 is gaining one extra possession. Who would not want an extra possession? Well, we could imagine a scenario where the two possessions are so rushed that their expected value is less than the value of the one “normal” possession the opponent is allowed. For example, suppose we value a conventional NBA possession at 1.09 expected points but the two rushed possessions usually generate bad shots and are only worth 0.5 expected points each. Then it might make more sense to execute a “1-for-1” strategy and simply grant the opponent the last shot.

Continue reading “An Analysis of the 2-for-1 Strategy in the NBA”