Predicting individual 3-point production
by Drew Cannon on Monday, September 17, 2012
There’s been quite a bit of recent discussion on this blog on the topic of three-point shooting. (Here, here, here, here, and here.)
There are two key takeaways from these articles: First, that it’s really hard to predict a team’s three-point percentage for a game, even knowing how well they tend to shoot three-pointers, and second, that to rate shooters against each other we need to keep a close eye on frequency of attempts as well as percentage. What I’m about to show you demonstrates that the difficulty of projecting three-point percentage also exists on the year-to-year player level and that we really need, as a basketball society, to move away from pure three-point percentage as the measure of a shooter.