Half-court shot stats in the NBA
May 4, 2011 7:24 AM   Subscribe

Where can I find statistics on half-court shots in the NBA?

I haven't found any basketball statistics site that breaks down any shot length beyond the 3-point line. (I did see a few shots in the paint/shots at the rim/midrange statistics.) What I'd like to find is just the overall NBA league half-court (or greater) shots made/attempted for the previous regular season. Anything more complex than that would be excellent but unnecessary.
posted by suckerpunch to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (6 answers total)
 
there was some guy interviewed on NPR a few weeks back that was a ridiculous statistician on basketball, and that was his hobby. I can't recall what he really did. maybe that will help out some.
posted by zombieApoc at 8:08 AM on May 4, 2011


ugh. scratch that he only does NCAA stats

NPR Link

Stat Guy (Ken Pomeroy) Link
posted by zombieApoc at 8:10 AM on May 4, 2011


Best answer: Here's a rough visualization, but it doesn't go beyond half court.

How interested are you? Here's the play index data with shot locations.
posted by milkrate at 8:11 AM on May 4, 2011


Response by poster: Milkrate : the data at Basketball Geek might work - I'll have to check to see how deep the Y coordinates run there, and what happens for full-court shots. It may work. Only problem is that my access will be limited to a cell phone until tonight.

A single-season league stat would be enough to satisfy my curiosity, so once I've wrtten a quick program to load and sort the data by the Y coordinate, I should be able to get something rough together. If the sample size is small enough where there's year-to-year variance, hopefully, the rest of the data (3 more regular seasons) would be enough to eliminate that.
posted by suckerpunch at 8:41 AM on May 4, 2011


I don't know much about basketball, so I don't know what statistics they track, but have you checked basketball-reference?
posted by leahwrenn at 9:12 AM on May 4, 2011


Response by poster: Finally ran the numbers with the data from your link, milkrate. Everything appeared to be correct - spot-checking a few of the halfcourt shots my queries returned matched up with play-by-play listings from ESPN.

The result : for all shots past half-court, NBA players shoot around 2.5%. For a four-foot square around the center of the court, NBA players shot 9/139, or 6.47%.

Why did I want to know this? Because Oklahoma City has a halfcourt shot competition during halftime of their home games. OKC fans are currently 3 for 46 this year - 6.52%. HELL YEAH OKLAHOMA.
posted by suckerpunch at 5:37 PM on May 5, 2011


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