Re: Sporting news article on Pierce

[Kestutis.Kveraga@dartmouth.edu (Kestutis Kveraga)]

A lot of excellent points by Alex here. Some comments below.

--- You wrote:
I agree that the numbers are deceiving, but I have a different 
interpretation on most of them. A key principle of stats are that they're 
not scalable. If someone shoots 50% FG and scores 5 ppg, that doesn't mean 
you can give him six times the shots and he'll be a 50% FG shooter with 30 
ppg. More likely he won't even be able to get that many shots off, and his 
FG% will drop close to zero if he really has to take the shots. 
--- end of quote ---

I would guess that this might work in the other direction as well: i.e., a
player's shooting % might go down with not enough shots "to get in a groove". I
would think that shooting % is an inverted-U function (probably asymmetric)
whose peak is the optimal number of shots for that player (within the context
of his team). 

--- You wrote:
1. Reliance on the 3 pt shot: Antoine shoots a good percentage, period. 
Shooting 33% from 3 pt range gives you one point a shot, shooting 50% from 
2 pt range gives you one point a shot. There are side effects that you 
mention and I agree with: he doesn't get to the line shooting 3's. He's not 
in position to rebound offensively. On the other hand, he needs to shoot 
the 3 to protect Pierce down low.
--- end of quote ---

I might only add that, whereas Antoine is usually at a physical disadvantage
down low, Pierce often dominates his opposing number physically and
thus,arguably is better suited for that kind of work. The refs also favor
Pierce much more. Given all this, it doesn't mean that Pierce should spend all
his time down low, and Antoine, behind the 3-point line.  Rather, Pierce should
spend *relatively* more time there, given the position he plays, for the
aforementioned reasons. 

--- You wrote:
And 37% is a high enough percentage to justify a lot of side effects. The 
fact that he can get off as many 3 pointers as he can at that percentage is 
a positive, not a negative. Reggie Miller actually shot the same percentage 
as Antoine. Is it because Miller's accuracy is the same? No, the reason is 
because Miller has to scratch and claw to get every attempt. He'd love to 
get more attempts at the same percentage. 
--- end of quote ---.

The flipside of this is that perhaps teams allow Antoine to shoot so many
threes because he won't shoot 50%, like Miller might if he were as open as
Antoine usually is. It also saves energy for their PFs, who now only have to
worry about getting the rebound, instead of guarding Antoine (it's not easy as
some might think, given Antoine's success rate in the low post).


--- You wrote:  
One negative side effect in general about shooting tons of 3's is that they 
are higher variance shots (in the technical sense of the probability 
distribution of points). Bad teams want higher variance, good teams don't. 
We're going to want to reduce our volume of 3's once we're better than a 
.500 team but until then, bombs away.
--- end of quote ---

This is right on.