Player: Shooting, Frequency & Accuracy

Location Definitionsclick to show/hide

This data is based on shot locations from play-by-play. This data can be especially messy and therefore is not exact — it depends on where the scorer marks the shot as the game is happening, which can be inexact or even sometimes way off. There are also issues with different scorers marking shots differently. For example, on a layup, some scorers mark where the player took off from and some scorers mark it where the shot was released (at the rim).

That said, these stats are generally pretty good and, over large samples, can tell us a lot about how a player plays. The official definitions are below, but here is a quick overview of how to think about these different types of locations:

• Rim: layups, dunks, and tip shots.
• Short midrange: usually runners and floaters off the drive, or hooks or fadeaways from the post.
• Long midrange: for guards and wings these are likely to be pull-ups off the dribble, for big men these are likely to be spot up or pick-and-pop jumpers.
• All midrange: the previous two categories combined.
• Corner threes: threes taken below the break in the arc, where the threes are a shorter distance than other three point attempts.
• Non-corner threes: threes taken above the break in the arc, removing heaves (estimated from play-by-play based on distance and time left on the shot/game clocks).
• All threes: the prevous two categories combined.

Example: Giannis Antetokounmpo

In the first table, showing where Giannis shot from, we see that over his career he has been incredibly good at attacking the rim. Even with a usage rate near the top of the league, as it has been over the last few years of this table, an enormous share of his shots have come at the rim. The flip side of that, of course, is that he has taken very few threes. In his first season, Giannis took almost a quarter of his shots from three, but since that point his rate of threes has been very low for a forward, even as the NBA has become much more willing to take threes overall.

There's a reason Giannis has taken so few threes, of course: that dark blue line on the right side of the second table shows that he has not shot well from beyond the arc in any season of his career. But that hasn't stopped him from being an incredibly efficient scorer. Despite living at the rim, he has also finished incredibly well there. In fact, his finishing at the basket improved every year of his career, to the point that he made 74% of his shots at the rim in 2018-19 even while taking 2/3rds of his shots there.