DSC 106 · Final Project · UCSD
The most efficient offense in NBA history killed the most beautiful shot in basketball.
For most of NBA history, the midrange jumper was just part of the game. Guys like Kobe, Dirk, and Tim Duncan lived there. Nobody questioned it. Then front offices started running the numbers and realized those shots were basically the worst ones you could take.
Scroll through the data below and see how fast things changed once teams figured that out.
Teams shot around 15 threes per game. Kobe, Duncan, Dirk ruled the elbow.
Teams ran their offense through the post or the elbow. Three-pointers existed but nobody was building a game plan around them.
Analytics started showing up in every front office. Teams realized the midrange was giving up value on every single shot. The math was pretty clear.
The Warriors won a title shooting 31 threes a game and suddenly every team wanted to play that way. It went from a strategy to basically the only strategy.
By 2021, four out of every ten shots in the NBA were threes. The midrange did not slowly fade out. It just kind of stopped existing.
If the trend keeps going, teams could be shooting close to 45 threes a game by 2030. The dashed line is the projection. The shaded area is the uncertainty around it.
2003 to 2021. Same sport, completely different game.
Each dot is one team, one season. There is a relationship but it is not that clean. Plenty of teams shot a lot of threes and still lost a lot of games.
Every title team since 2012 ranked by threes per game. The jump after 2015 is hard to miss.
Drag the slider to any three-point attempts per game number and see which season that matches. A number that was elite in 2010 is below average today.
Set a hypothetical 3-point shooting percentage and see what the historical data predicts for win rate — with a 95% confidence interval built from 569 team-seasons.