Jump Shot Study 2

We decided to study how much players move before catch and shoot jumpers. The motivation for this study comes from figuring out if we were training in the most efficient manner possible. In most shooting workouts you will see a lot of stationary jump shots, but we have to question whether that is the most realistic shot that will prepare our athletes to shoot better in games. We wanted to look at what happens most in games, a stationary shot, a shot with a little movement down the court (Closer to baseline), or a shot with a little movement up the court (Closer to halfcourt). From most workouts I’ve seen in the past (including my own) over 50% of shots are stationary. We also wanted to see when moving whether a player sprints or slides into a shot. To make our training the most effective we needed to see if that was what the game of Basketball represents.

The majority of the analysis was focused on determining the points per possession (PPP) as well as the frequency of shots based on different aspects of the shot; there was an emphasis placed on understanding the effects of movement and the shooter’s tempo from both a points per possession standpoint to understand the efficiency of said shot, as well as the frequency of each shot. Using the Tidyverse in R we were able to manipulate the data to answer our questions. To gather data, we watched 50 shots from 40 different NCAA DI players, focusing on teams that ran a more modern style of offense. Some of the teams included are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Auburn, Baylor, Houston, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, UCLA, USC, and Villanova. This amounted to 2000 records in our dataset with 10 fields. One important thing to keep in mind is that because the data is not normally distributed and is not a random sample of shots, all of the results show correlation (if any) and NOT causation.

By solely analyzing the tempo of shots, we found that players were sliding into their shot almost 50% of the time (47.2%) while sprinting to a spot (22.5%) and not moving before a shot (30.2%) both occurred about 25% of the time. While there is a difference in the percentage of shots following a tempo, the PPP found when sprinting into a shot or sliding into one is the same at 1.11; conversely, not moving before the shot resulted in a PPP of 1.26.

When analyzing the direction of movement, if any, for each shot, we found that the different movement directions from this study occurred at a relatively similar pace; players were moving down (closer to the corner) 39.6% of the time, moving up (further from the corner) 30.1% of the time, and not moving 30.2% of the time. As we saw earlier, the PPP when not moving before the shot was 1.26, and the PPP for shots where the player was moving down was 1.09 compared to 1.13 for when a player was moving up before the shot.

When looking at both tempo and movement, we saw that the majority of shots that weren’t from a standstill came from a player sliding down. This occurred 27.5% of the time – for reference, we found that a player sliding up happened 19.8% of the time, a player sprinting up happened 10.4% of the time, and a player sprinting down happened 12.2% of the time. Non-movement shots still occurred 30.2% of the time. Interestingly enough, the more frequent combinations of movement and tempo (sliding down and sprinting down) resulted in the lowest PPP at 1.09 and 1.10, respectively. Running up to shoot and sliding up both resulted in a PPP of 1.13

These results will affect our training. Since a player not moving before a shot happens in about 30% of shots that’s what our training will represent, while close to 40% of shots will represent a player moving down, and 30% of shots represent a player moving up. This will prepare our athletes for the shots they will take in games. There are certain players that this will not be the case. If you’re a player that doesn’t shoot a lot of threes then most of your looks will be stationary catch and shoots, so we will train that the most for those types of players. If you’re a player with the “Movement Shooter” archetype you will be sprinting into more shots than others, so this needs to be represented in training to best prepare for games. The whole point of all this research is to find out what happens in games the most so we can prepare our athletes in the most efficient way possible. The results of this study didn’t spark any interest in new studies but we will be back with more. The Film Don’t Lie!