FanPost

"Lol, Nah" Is Taking a lot of Mid-Range Shots Bad for the Knicks?

Earlier this week I asked if the Knicks should stop taking mid-range jumpers. There was no real conclusion made from that piece, so I decided to take a look at another relationship to see if the high volume of mid-range shots is bad for the Knicks.

To see, I looked at the percentage of mid-range shots of total field goals teams have taken since the 2011 lockout, and plotted it against their winning percentage. The idea behind this is, the mid-range is the most inefficient shot in the NBA, so taking more of them means teams are more likely to be inefficient and not win. I used data from the last three seasons because time constraints, and the idea that the NBA landscape changed with the last lockout.

Here are the results:

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stats from basketball reference compiled in xcel

There is no real relationship here based on the date. Our R^2 value is very low at 0.0458 meaning that only 4.6% of the data is explained by the line of best fit.

So in the NBA the past 3 years, whatever percentage of shots you take that are mid-range jumpers doesn't really dictate your winning percentage. In a perfect world, I'd run this regression again but control for fg% on those mid-range jumpers, but I don't have STATA or R so I cannot do that. Maybe one day someone here could pay for me to get that software and take a refresher course on it. Not that I'm asking. No seriously I'm not, I'm just going to shut up now.

So does taking more mid-range jumpers mean anything for your winning percentage, the data above says "lol, nah."