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Hi Trepidation, Thanks for your comments. I'll do my best to reply to some of them, but I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure which part of the analysis you object to. If I don't answer your questions, please try to clarify for me. ... I have a question at (22). Why did you choose to take a rat...

Jeff, At this stage, it's hard to draw firm conclusions from what I did, since the model is still so abstract and some of the assumptions are hard to validate. But if you take the model and its conclusions seriously, you come up with a rule that looks like this: http://i1012.photobucket.com/albums/a...

Jeff, Isn't the "optimal time to shoot" when an opportunity at or above a certain threshold presents itself? And, isn't that disconnected from the clock? The point of the study is that the threshold is not disconnected from the clock. When you have plenty of time, you can afford to be extr...

Hi everyone, I appreciate the points that are being raised here. I only wish that I had as much apparent confidence as schtevie does that my paper is "important"! schtevie, I also appreciate you emphasizing the sort of dramatically pronounced difference between possessions beginning with a...

Hi everyone, The last two years there was a pickup game on the Sunday just after the MIT Sloan Sports Conference. Any interest in doing it again this year? If so, I suggest meeting at Basketball City in Boston at 10am on Sunday morning, March 4. I think that's the same time as in previous years. The...

Guy, You're right that I also make the sort of arbitrary assumption of a flat distribution of shot quality. This is certainly an arbitrary assumption, but my bet is that it's probably okay as a first attempt. Tweaking the distribution more and more becomes increasingly speculative and introduces all...

That's a bit of a tall order, but if there is interest then I can write some automated script this weekend to sort through the data in that way.

Are other people interested? Would you like the data also broken down by dead ball vs. live ball situations?

Just so that everyone knows my own personal opinion, as the author of the paper in question, I'll state it explicitly: I agree that the paper received an incommensurate amount of media attention, and that much of that was driven by the ability to write "NBA players are doing it wrong!" My ...

DSMok1, sorry to overlook your earlier comment. It sounds like your suggestion is a good one, but I don't understand how one can discriminate between an assisted shot attempt and a non-assisted shot attempt. In other words, how can you tell which missed shots were assisted (or would have been assist...

That's a good point: that the distribution of shot quality can depend on the shot clock time. I'd love to do better than assuming a static distribution (same mean and variance of potential shot opportunities at all shot clock times) if I could only come up with a reasonable way to figure it out.

what I don't get is your assumption that if teams took more early shots they would continue to enjoy the same efficiency at time t as they currently get I'm not making that assumption. If teams are willing to take lower-quality shots early in the clock, then their shooting rate will rise and their ...

Yes, you guys got it right. The "time" column of my table means "reading on the shot clock", so 24 means the beginning and 1 means the end. Evan, thanks for your plots. The distribution of shots taken really does look like two Gaussian distributions centered at about 9 and 20 sec...

Anyway, I am learning an important lesson: I should have discussed the paper here before submitting it for publication! I think I'll leave a comment on the PLoS website directing readers here for relevant discussion. mystic, I'm glad you liked the approach. I hope that in the future you (or someone ...

mystic, great synopsis of the problem. That was exactly the issue I had. How do I infer "shots that were available to take" when the record shows only "shots that were taken"? Here's the table I used to make the plot above. The data comes from 4720 games during the 2006-2007 thro...

As per the suggestions made by some of you, I broke down the shooting rate and points per shot a little more based on how the possession began. The results are below. Basically, I found that possessions beginning with a defensive rebound have much higher shooting rates early in the shot clock. In ot...