Jon Nichols

A common approach for NBA teams is to surround their superstars and offensive playmakers with efficient shooters who are more than willing to hit the open three-pointer when given a chance. The playmakers draw much of the defense’s attention and command double and triple teams. Therefore, it is prudent to collect efficient shooters around them.

Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time was to make a player rating system that is totally customizable. Every team has different needs at different times, so the one-number-fits-all style of player rating systems, which has been the norm, seems inappropriate in certain situations. Today I would like to explain to you something I’ve created called the TPS (Talent Plus Style) player rating system (movie reference: when I produce TPS reports in the future, just know that I did see the memo and I won’t forget to include the new cover sheet).

If you’ve been reading Basketball-Statistics.com over the last few weeks, you know that I’ve been examining the individual shot selection of a number of the game’s superstars using the play-by-play data at BasketballValue.

First was LeBron James. Next was Dwyane Wade. Today I’ll be looking at the shooting tendencies of Kobe Bryant. My methods will be the same as with the first two, so if you have any questions about how or why I do certain things, be sure to check out those first two articles.

Here are Bryant’s shooting tendencies by quarter:

As a follow-up on my piece on LeBron James, I’ve decided to take a look at another superstar: Dwyane Wade. Like James, Wade is a prolific scorer who makes his living close to the basket. How does Wade change his offensive style as the game goes on? Let’s take a look:

Now that I’ve explored shot types at the team level, it’s time to move on to a single player. What better player to look at than the league’s MVP, LeBron James? Using the play-by-play data at BasketballValue, I will explore how James changes his style of attack as the game progresses, and whether or not he optimizes his shot selection.

The graph below shows LeBron’s shot selection for each quarter during the 2008-09 season:

I’m going to look at the shooting styles of the Philadelphia 76ers in the same way I examined the Lakers. I chose the Sixers because they are one of the teams at the extreme ends of the spectrum– they attempted the second fewest three-pointers of any team in the league last season and converted those shots at the lowest rate.

Before I move on with more studies on team shot types, let’s take a brief look at shot optimization. As you can see from my Lakers study, L.A. takes a great deal of midrange shots despite it being their least efficient shot by a large margin. On the surface, that certainly seems like a suboptimal strategy.

In my last article I took a look at how the Lakers mix up their shot attempts as games progress. After posting my results at the APBRmetrics board, a common request was take a look at the efficiency of these different shot types. Today, I will do just that using True Shot Percentage.

In my last article, I suggested that knowing how an individual team changes the way it attempts its shots as a game progresses might be a valuable piece of information. Today I will take a look at the Los Angeles Lakers.