Post by eric on Oct 17, 2015 17:31:16 GMT -6
So I took a league of identical players, parsed the play by play of 300 of their games (because that's what turned out to fit in an Excel column), and saw how their free throw attempts by possession ending in free throw broke down: 566 had one shot, 2273 had two, and 5 had three. This works out to .555 free throw attempts per possession ending in free throw, noticeably higher than the .44 of the NBA. I then took a real league and repeated the analysis. This time there were 860 one shot, 3434 two, and 4 three, which also works out to... .555 FTA per possession. I don't have any files with our league in it, but in the absence of evidence to the contrary we should assume that .555 applies here too.
The consequence of this is that the true shooting or points per true shot attempt figures have artificially inflated the efficiencies of players who draw a lot of free throw attempts. I had previously determined that C/PF in our league averaged 1.00 pts/tsa while SF/SG/PG averaged 1.10, and last year's figures were 1.00 and 1.08 respectively, but if we change from .44 to .555 we instead get .96 and 1.06 respectively.
The net of all this is that big men are in general even worse than we thought they were previously, and point guards (who take by far the fewest FTA/FGA) even better, but the effect is a small one.
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As an aside, I have always assumed that players get 30% of their rebounds on the offensive end and 70% on the defensive. (This probably overrates small players and underrates big players to a small degree.) I decided to check how many the identical league got, and in those 300 games there turned out to be 8519 offensive and 21076 defensive rebounds, or 29% on the offensive end. I'm comfortable sticking with 30%.
The consequence of this is that the true shooting or points per true shot attempt figures have artificially inflated the efficiencies of players who draw a lot of free throw attempts. I had previously determined that C/PF in our league averaged 1.00 pts/tsa while SF/SG/PG averaged 1.10, and last year's figures were 1.00 and 1.08 respectively, but if we change from .44 to .555 we instead get .96 and 1.06 respectively.
The net of all this is that big men are in general even worse than we thought they were previously, and point guards (who take by far the fewest FTA/FGA) even better, but the effect is a small one.
.
As an aside, I have always assumed that players get 30% of their rebounds on the offensive end and 70% on the defensive. (This probably overrates small players and underrates big players to a small degree.) I decided to check how many the identical league got, and in those 300 games there turned out to be 8519 offensive and 21076 defensive rebounds, or 29% on the offensive end. I'm comfortable sticking with 30%.
