Shoot Me Baby One More Time

Let's imagine that we are recruiting a team to dominate Euroleague. We would choose our maestro from the list here. Now,what's next? A solid big guy or a reliable shooter ? It depends on one's perspective for sure, on the other hand I analyzed the marksmen in this post.

There are several kinds of player in every team's rosters. Involving players with different types are considered essential for a team roster. It's easy to understand though, if you have players who can play at different roles then you have numerous offensive and defensive options to apply. Yet, there are some types of players indispensable for any team's roster. Spot shooters -aka snipers- are such kind of players. Every team needs a reliable shooter regardless of the system they choose to play. These players could be leader of their teams -like Kevin Durant or La Bomba- or could be a mediocre player -like Danny Green- who is only perfect for some well-defined,limited roles. As I said, every team needs a sniper,but how can you rate shooters? As you can guess, field goal percentages are not enough for us. What makes shooting hard? Could every two pointer attempt be considered as shooting position? Are there any differences between scoring two pointer and scoring three pointer ?

Let's get down to the business. There several elements which makes shooting hard. First of all, it's very important how your opponent's defense is. If they can defend shooters well, it would be much harder for your players to shoot. Also, volume of the shoots affects shooting percentage. Shooting percentage tends to decrease when number of shoots increases. It makes sense actually. It would much more harder to shoot 10 balls in a row with 100 % then shoot 2 balls in a row with 100%. So, we need to create a correlation function between field goal percentage and field goal attempt to get rid of that problem. After I've formed up correlation function, another question bumped in to my head; could every two pointer attempt be considered as shooting position.  Definitely, no! Remember, dunks and layups are also counted as two pointer attempts in boxscore. Yet, they cannot be counted as shooting positions. We need to eliminate these positions from real shooting positions to determine shooting percentage. After all adjustments, there was still a few more problems. One of them was, weighting two pointers and three pointers. Since it’s harder to score three  pointer than to score two pointer - even though some crazy guys look more confident behind the arc like Steve Novak, they are exceptions of the rule, and you know what they say about the expections, they prove the rule -, we need to reward three pointers slightly higher than two pointers. Actually, we don’t need to do anything at all. As the names implies, they can be easily weighted with the ratio of 2 to 3. Now, there is still one more problem; Free Throws. I couldn't decide if I should regard free throw attempts as shooting attempts. To be honest, either ways make sense to me, so I made two analysis.

The list above doesn't include free throw numbers. Opponent's Strength column represents how the opponent of the corresponding players' team defend shooting positions. As I mentioned before, 2-Pointer Rate doesn't include dunks and layups. Shooting Rates are final results of the adjusted numbers of difficulty of the shoots, shooting volumes and weighted shooting rates. 

This list on the other hand, also includes Free Throw Rates. There are no fantastical changes. Leader and the runner-up are still in the same place. We have some new comers like Sonny Weems,Vassilis Spanoulis,Curtis Jerrells,Milos Teodosic and Jason Kapono. Also, we have some players who is out of Top 20 list like Earl Colloway,Jaycee Carroll,Brion Rush,Bracey Wright and Devin Smith.

I couldn't decide which list is better, it's up to you now...