{"id":2662,"date":"2018-03-28T14:54:15","date_gmt":"2018-03-28T19:54:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bowdoinglobalist.com\/?p=2662"},"modified":"2023-11-28T15:43:36","modified_gmt":"2023-11-28T15:43:36","slug":"the-nbas-schadenfreude-prospects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/students.bowdoin.edu\/bowdoin-review\/sports\/the-nbas-schadenfreude-prospects\/","title":{"rendered":"The NBA’s Schadenfreude Prospects"},"content":{"rendered":"

NBA players are soooo good. They are so very, very good. Absurdly good, even. We all know this! Youtube channels<\/a> posting nightly highlight videos get a half-million subscribers. This one video<\/a> of a Giannis Antetokounmpo dunk got 430,000 views in ten days! Yup, the NBA is chock full of phenomenal talents, and we love to see them at their best. Right?<\/p>\n

Well…<\/p>\n

It turns out that we also like to see NBA players at their worst. Lowlight videos? Yes please<\/a>. Weekly \u201cShaqtin\u2019 A Fool\u201d segments on TNT? You bet<\/a>. Want to know who got picked first in the All-Star draft? We don\u2019t care, just tell us who got picked last<\/a>! Again, it\u2019s not that we don\u2019t know how good NBA players are. If anything, we relish their failures exactly because they are normally so excellent. Whatever the reason, there is something about watching a player go, say, 0-for-10 from the field that puts smiles on our faces.<\/p>\n

Well, if horrible shooting makes us happy, then we should identify those players most likely to bring us future joy! These are the \u2018schadenfreude prospects\u2019\u2014let\u2019s call them shoddies, for short. To be precise, these are the players most likely to take at least ten shots in a basketball game and make exactly none of them.<\/p>\n

Methodology<\/h4>\n

Why 0-for-10+? Because I said so, that\u2019s why. Or maybe because it\u2019s a round number? Anyway, 0\/10 just feels<\/i> so much worse than 0\/9, and this whole thing is about feeling and because I said so, so just drop it already.<\/p>\n

Since the 2014-15 season, there have been 20 players to shoot 0\/10 or worse from the field. Here they are:<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
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\nThe list includes such luminaries as Trey Burke, Jerian Grant, and Norris Cole. Okay. We all know that NBA players are good, but these guys definitely fall into the \u201cless-good\u201d camp. It\u2019s not so surprising to see them here. But wait, Kyle Korver? Aaron Gordon? Kristaps Porzingis was named an All-Star this year, and he had a game where he shot 0\/11!<\/p>\n

So it seems that both good players and bad players can have terrible shooting performances. If we are going to predict the next player to go 0\/10, we\u2019ll have to find something besides player skill that connects the guys on this list. My hypothesis is that shot location is as important as shot-making ability. Notice that the list contains a large number of jump-shot aficionados. Korver and JR Smith and Robert Covington, for instance, do very little besides shooting threes. Even the guys who we don\u2019t think of as three-point specialists, like Burke and Grant, aren\u2019t the type of players who can get all the way to the rim to score. They rely on on lots of floaters and midrange twos. It makes sense that this would the be sort of player to go 0\/10; players shoot far worse on jump shots than on shots at the rim, so a player who relies on outside shooting would be more likely to go through an epic cold streak.<\/p>\n

Of course, efficiency still matters\u2014if you are bad at making shots then you are more likely to miss them all. You also have to take a moderately high number of shots to make this list. You can\u2019t go 0\/10 without taking ten shots!<\/p>\n

This leaves us with three components that increase the probability of a 0\/10 night: lots of jump shots, poor efficiency, and a good number of field goal attempts. We also have a group of 20 players who already accomplished the unfortunate feat. Now, to produce a list of schoddies, we want to find the NBA players who are as similar as possible to the group of 20 in the three areas we identified. Our schadenfreude prospects should shoot the same proportion of jumpers, have equally bad efficiency, and jack up a comparable amount of shots to past 0\/10ers.<\/p>\n

How do we find comparable players? Luckily for us, NBA.com\/stats offers shot location data for every player in the league. The site can tell us what percentage of Rodney Hood\u2019s points came on mid-rangers and three-pointers, what percentage came in the paint, and what he ate for breakfast last Tuesday. A little work, and voila: we have a spreadsheet<\/a> with the shooting tendencies for each 0\/10 alumnus. It was easy enough to add efficiency (true-shooting percentage) and shots per game. I also added the percentage of each player\u2019s successful shots that came off of a teammate\u2019s assist. As noted earlier, most of the players who have shot 0\/10 are not skilled ball-handlers or playmakers. Most are catch-and-shoot gunners, who rely on others to create their opportunities. This stat was another way, along with three-point attempt rate, to quantify \u201cgunner-ness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, it is time to use the data to find comparable players. For every measure, I found the point that split the list 75-25 into two segments. For example, three quarters of the list scored fewer than 38% of their points in the paint (the league median<\/a> is a little around 41%). Three quarters scored more than 13% of their points from the midrange (the median is about 11%). These results confirm our suspicions\u2014the 20, as a group, tended to take more jump shots and fewer shots in the paint than the average player. The vast majority also had below average efficiency, and nearly all took more than seven shots per game. In the end, my criteria were:<\/p>\n