01:05 PM - January 21, 2016 by ChaseB“The NBA is a make or miss league,” said every NBA head coach ever. The drive-and-kick-pick-and-roll world that we now live in is what the NBA is about in 2016. To beat a lot of the best defenses, you have to get them moving side to side, run multiple side pick-and-roll actions, and just hope that rapid ball movement can get you a semi-open look.
In a lot of cases, you’re hoping the ball moves quicker than the defense, or you’re hoping there’s just a single breakdown in the help rotations. Other times you’re hoping the gravity of a great shooter like a Redick or the general greatness of someone like a Curry can bend the defense to give you an easy backdoor cut for a screener or skip pass to an open shooter on the opposite wing.
Oh, and obviously the open corner 3 is still a magical paradise of efficiency.
The point is, even when you do all of these things, it still comes down to making or missing the shot. In many cases, this still means making a semi-contested shot.
The explosion of information made available to the public via SportVU on NBA.com’s stats page has been a nice little toy to mess with for NBA fans these last couple years. While we don’t have every piece of data, we (the public) do have enough to make some general observations. As a video game player and NBA fan, this means I have an extra data set as well: NBA 2K16.
With that in mind, after the jump I’ll be talking about contested and uncontested shots from behind the 3-point line. It’s been a major talking point these last couple years when it comes to NBA 2K. Whether it was the “green release” patch four from last year that made jumpers too easy, or just the general discussion around the frequency with which contested shots do or do not go in the basket, people have a lot of strong opinions on this topic. I have an opinion on this topic as well. However, in the first part of this series, I simply want to outline the data and give you all a chance to provide feedback.
So after the jump, I’ll detail some of the data points I’m working off of to put this article together, and let the numbers mostly speak for themselves from there. Then when I release part two, I’ll dig more into my thoughts on the topic contested shots and discuss it from the perspective of a NBA 2K16 player.
Read More - The Contested Shot Conundrum
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