The 3-point line is a lottery
by Ken Pomeroy on Thursday, February 23, 2012
Continuing the discussion from yesterday, let’s look at more scatterplots! We’ve looked exclusively at defense so far and in order to get a better understanding of how defense works, we need to look at both sides of the ball. Because clearly the offense has some control over what happens on each possession as well.
To get our bearings, let’s look at something that the defense should have more control over compared to the offense - blocked shots. In all of the subsequent pairs of plots, the offensive plot will be on the left and the defensive version will be on the right. Here’s blocked shot percentage:
This makes some sense. Defensive block percentage is a better predictor of the future than offensive block percentage. Basically, a defense’s ability to block shots is greater than the offense’s ability to avoid them. Anthony…