Study suggests NBA shooters are playing too conservatively

The findings, revealed Wednesday in the online journal PLoS ONE by author Brian Skinner, said optimized scoring efficiency could produce 4.5 more points a game and more than 10 extra wins in a typical season.

“Strategic decisions in basketball have long been made based on the intuition of the coach or players,” Skinner said.

“But as advanced quantitative analyses are increasingly applied to the game, it's becoming clear that many of the conventional, intuitive ideas for basketball strategy are misguided or sub-optimal.”

The study says that only high-quality shots would be taken early in a possession, with the quality level sliding downward as the 24-second shot clock ticks down, although Skinner suggests NBA players might be overly reluctant to shoot the ball early in a possession and thereby miss out on high-quality chances.

His data comes from games in four NBA seasons, from the 2006-07 through the 2009-10 campaigns.

A key factor in deciding how likely a shot is to be made before a player should take it, Skinner says, is how many more potential shot opportunities remain in a possession.

Skinner finds the expected number of points made on any possession averages out to .86, while an optimized shooting strategy could boost that to .91, a boost that could be expected to boost a team's victory total more than 10 games.

“One natural way to interpret the discrepancy between the observed and theoretical optimized shooting behavior of NBA teams is as a sign of overconfident behavior,” Skinner said.

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