Why the league’s preoccupation with threes is a byproduct of the statistical revolution Sport News

International programs caught on too. Canada’s junior camps run 500 three-point reps daily, mirroring the volume-heavy model that powered their Olympic curling squad’s opening win (https://likesport.biz/articles/canada-vs-germany-olympic-curling-opener.html). Copy the approach in basketball and you’ll produce guards who fire 8.2 threes per 36 by age 19, exactly the pipeline that fed Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Jamal Murray.

Action plan for aspiring shooters: raise arc to 45°, release above the hairline, and aim for 11 revolutions per second-the spin rate linked to 41.3% accuracy in Noah shooting-lab trials. Pair mechanical tweaks with 1,200 game-speed jumpers weekly; anything below 800 fails to move the needle in SportVU tracking. Track makes, not takes, and stop the workout only after hitting 80 out of 100 unguarded reps; miss two in a row and the counter resets to zero. Follow the protocol for six weeks and you’ll add roughly 4.7% to your catch-and-shoot numbers-enough to turn a fringe prospect into a guaranteed two-way deal.

Shot-Chart Heatmaps That Triggered the 3-Point Boom

Overlay Kyle Korver’s 2013-14 chart: right-corner 50-for-96, left-corner 46-for-87, arc top 62-for-148; color-code anything ≥40% in neon red and the corners glow like stop-lights. Copy the palette, send it to every G-League gym, and mandate two daily reps from each spot-no mid-range bailout until the player hits 80 of 100.

The same map shrank the Rockets’ mid-range tries from 1 087 to 468 in one season, flipped their corner volume to 1 045 attempts at 39.7%, and produced a +9.2 point differential per 100 possessions; steal the file, shrink your own mid-range by 30%, reallocate those touches to above-the-break above 36%, and you’ll bank an extra 5.4 points per night with the same roster.

How Coaches Use Synergy Tags to Hunt Corner 3s

Filter every clip with SHOOTER: weak-side tag plus CLOSEOUT: run-off and you’ll see 1.27 pts per possession on corner triples last season; paste that code into the scout, demand the ball hit the nail defender’s hip on the sprint, and the number jumps to 1.41.

Phoenix built a 12-play loop tagged EMPTY-45-DUNK; it starts with a deep curl that drags the low man inside the charge circle, then a second tag-STUNT: late-triggers the skip. 63% of their corner looks arrived off that slice, and only four teams forced more help rotations of 2.5 seconds or longer.

One assistant in Dallas exports the SKIP PASS: 25-40 feet tag into a heat-map macro; he sorts by defender sprint speed (>17 mph) and finds the corner shooter while the closeout is still 14 feet away. The result: 18 open threes across a four-game Western road trip, 1.52 pts per shot.

Denver tags every ROLL: short that ends with the dunker’s defender lifting above the break; they auto-queue the clip for the opposing big, show it to him on the practice floor tablet, then run five-minute 4-on-4 drills forcing him to stay glued to the strong-side block. In the next matchup the same opponent surrendered 11 corner tries, double his season average.

Smaller staffs lean on Synergy’s PISTOL-FLARE bundle: pistol action into a flare for the point guard, tagged when the screener’s man sinks below the break. One G-League club turned those into 1.38 pts per possession, printed the top ten clips, and stapled them to each player’s hotel-room door; they shot 42% from the corner over a 17-day stretch.

Export the code, clip the tag, mail it to the video guy, and walkthrough tomorrow: five reps, corner line painted neon, passer told to fire if the help’s foot crosses the restricted arc. Do it right and the math wins the game before the anthem ends.

Salary Cap Math: $ per Point by Shot Location

Stop paying non-star wings to shoot long twos. From 14-22 ft, the typical 35 % shooter produces 0.70 pts/shot; at $8 M salary that is $11.4 M per 100 points, 2.6× pricier than a 38 % corner-three specialist on the same check.

Corner contracts are the bargain bin. 150 players took ≥100 corner tries last season; the median hit 39 %, generating 1.17 pts/shot. Because the cap hit for those 150 ranged from $1.8 M (minimum) to $12 M, the cost curve is brutal: every extra $1 M beyond $5 M raises the $/100-points from $4.3 M to $7.1 M, so keep the specialist under mid-level money or trade him before extension talks.

Above-the-break money is superstar-only territory. League-average accuracy there is 35.4 %, yielding 1.06 pts/shot. Only ten players beat 40 % on ≥200 attempts; their teams paid on average $29.7 M yet still cleared $4.6 M per 100 points, cheaper than the $5.8 M cost of a $15 M role player shooting 36 % from the same spot. If your guy can’t top 39 %, reroute those possessions to the corner or the dunker spot.

Front offices now bake the uplift into offers. A 37 % above-break gunner who slides to 42 % in the corner adds 0.15 pts/shot. On 500 attempts that equals 75 extra points-roughly 1.5 wins-so a $3 M salary jump is justified. Anything steeper wipes out the surplus value and pushes the club into tax territory without raising the ceiling.

Dead-money mid-rangers still exist because agents sell shot diversity. The counter is cold accounting: a 43 % mid-range scorer (0.86 pts/shot) on a $10 M deal costs $11.6 M per 100 points, worse than a rookie minimum corner sniper. Renegotiate those contracts downward, or bench the player until he relocates behind the arc.

Tracking Data Filters to Identify Hidden Stretch-Bigs

Scrape play-by-play XML for every pick-and-pop where the screener’s defender drops below the nail; tag clips where the big pops to 24 ft and the close-out arrives ≥0.9 s late-those are the stealth stretch-big reps. Last year 42 NCAA centers met that filter on ≥40 possessions; 11 shot ≥38 % on the resulting catch-and-shoot triples and none were drafted.

Second filter: Synergy Trailer possession, defender matched up against a 6-10+ player, shot within first seven seconds, closest contest labelled open or wide open. Export the CSV, keep rows where the shooter’s career FT % is ≥75-proxy for soft touch-and rim-attempt rate < 25 %. The intersection spits out names like Utah’s Branden Carlson, who drilled 47 trailing threes at 41 %, yet DraftExpress still lists him as a rim-runner only.

Third screen: Second Spectrum’s Big tag, defender inside six feet of the rim at the moment of the shot; cross with possessions where the player shoots from 25-29 ft. Sort by volume (≥100 such shots) and efficiency (≥1.05 pts/shot). Only four under-22 athletes clear the bar-Holmes, Kel’el Ware, Trayce Jackson-Davis, and Michigan’s freshman Tarris Reed, who hit 27-of-65 (42 %) despite being listed 6-9 without shoes.

Drop any prospect whose assist rate on those pops is below 5 %; stretch-big value collapses if the defense can ignore the pass. The survivors average 8.2 potential assists per 100 pops and force help that produces a lay-up or corner triple on 38 % of the follow-up actions. That’s the hidden juice GMs miss when they over-weight volume.

Last filter: load stints where the player guarded the rim (within six feet) on ≥300 possessions yet held opponents under 54 % at the cup. Merge with the shooting file; the overlap gives a two-way stretch-big pool of roughly six D-1 athletes each season. Offer a two-way contract before the data hits public DraftExpress boards-market correction vanishes within 72 hours.

Package the four filters into a single R script: pull play-by-play with hoopR, merge Second Spectrum’s tracking tables via BigQuery, export a 30-row shortlist. A front-office intern can run it nightly; the whole process costs 0.8 CPU-hours and spots the next Brook Lopez six months before the consensus catches up.

FAQ:

Why did the league-wide three-point attempt rate jump so sharply after 2015?

Two numbers flipped. Prior to 2015 clubs treated corner threes as efficient (≈ 38 %) and above-the-break threes as acceptable (≈ 35 %). When SportVU tracking proved the latter were really 36-37 % and the former had dropped a point, the break-even line for every spot behind the arc converged at roughly 1.08 points per shot. Coaches no longer had to choose between good and other threes; every look beyond 22 ft became mathematically equal to a 54 % mid-range attempt. Once that became common knowledge, attempts from deep rose from 22 % of all shots in 2014-15 to 34 % within two seasons.

Which single roster move first signalled that front offices were betting on volume rather than percentage?

Houston’s summer of 2016. The Rockets replaced Dwight Howard with Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon, two players whose combined career three-point accuracy was a hair under 37 %—solid but not elite. The bet wasn’t that they would shoot 42 %; it was that each could launch eight or nine a night without hesitation. Houston’s three-point rate leapt from 35 % to 46 % overnight, the first time any team cleared 40 %. Every other GM saw a 55-win team built on 30-footers and started copying the template at the next trade deadline.

How do defenses counter a team that takes half its shots from deep?

They stop guarding the shooter and start guarding the launch point. Switching everything keeps the ball out of the hands of the best passer, because a pick-and-roll that ends with a big rolling into open space is still more valuable than a contested three. The second counter is to let the worst shooter shoot: drop coverage against non-shooting wings encourages the very shot the offense doesn’t want. Finally, teams ice the strong side and flood the weak side with help, turning a potential catch-and-shoot into a dribble-hand-off that burns four extra seconds. The goal is not to lower the percentage; it is to lower the frequency below the math break-even.

Has the extra emphasis on threes actually made the average game less entertaining?

Depends on the ticket buyer. Since 2015 the average margin of victory has shrunk from 11.2 to 9.4 points, so more games are within one possession inside the final minute. That tension is exciting. What some fans hate is the visual sameness: 30-footers look identical on YouTube, whereas a 12-foot fadeway or a baseline spin move is instantly memorable. Ratings have not dropped; they have flattened. The league is betting that a closer score outweighs stylistic repetition, and so far Vegas and Disney keep paying the same money for the broadcast rights.

Could a rule change realistically push the league back toward mid-range shots?

Short of moving the line, only one tweak would matter: treat a kicked-leg foul on a three the same as a clear-path foul—two shots and the ball. If shooters can’t hunt four-point plays, the expected value of a deep attempt falls from 1.08 to about 0.96. A 20 % drop in free-throw trips would shift the break-even accuracy needed from 36 % to 39 %, a bar only ten players clear on high volume. Overnight, the math would push offenses back to 18-footers they can bank at 45 %. Everything else—wider corner space, taller arc, four-point line—barely moves the calculator.

Why did the NBA start tracking wide-open threes separately, and how did that tiny footnote turn the whole league into a three-point contest?

Front-offices noticed the raw three-point percentage had plateaued around 35-36 % for a decade, so in 2013-14 they added a camera tag that logs how close the nearest defender is within two feet. The first season of data showed shots with no defender closer than six feet dropped in at 39.5 %—a silent green light that those looks were basically lay-ups from deep. Once that number hit spreadsheets, every coach’s off-season slide deck had the same bullet: generate six feet of airspace, not just any three. Teams re-designed pin-downs and Spain picks to chase that label; within three seasons the league’s wide-open tries jumped from 11 a night to 27. Tracking didn’t just describe the game—it rewrote the incentives overnight.