Everyone by now knows about this paper I wrote a few months ago: http://arxiv.org/abs/1604.05266
Using data science / machine learning methodologies, it basically showed that the most important factors in characterizing a team’s playoff eligibility are the opponent field goal percentage and the opponent points per game. This seems to suggest that defensive factors as opposed to offensive factors are the most important characteristics shared among NBA playoff teams. It was also shown that championship teams must be able to have very strong defensive characteristics, in particular, strong perimeter defense characteristics in combination with an effective half-court offense that generates high-percentage two-point shots. A key part of this offensive strategy must also be the ability to draw fouls.
Some people have commented that despite this, teams who frequently attempt three point shots still can be considered to have an efficient offense as doing so leads to better rebounding, floor spacing, and higher percentage shots. We show below that this is not true. Looking at the last 16 years of all NBA teams (using the same data we used in the paper), we performed a correlation analysis of an individual NBA team’s 3-point attempts per game and other relevant variables, and discovered:
One sees that there is very little correlation between a team’s 3-point attempts per game and 2-point percentage, free throws, free throw attempts, and offensive rebounds. In fact, at best, there is a somewhat “medium” anti-correlation between 3-point attempts per game and a team’s 2-point attempts per game.
Relativity Digest 