MMB's Updated List Of Players That Shouldn't Shoot That Much

Guess what: The Los Angeles Lakers are in town again and that's a great cause to look into the "Hero Ball" topic again. I tried to approach the issue here, but in the end it was not very satisfying to be honest. I calculated a Skip%, which pointed out the percentage of shots a player should skip because his teammates are that much better (efficiency-wise). I already pointed out some flaws of that approach, because I simply compared the players PPS (points per shot) and his teammates PPS. That led to Kobe Bryant not making the Top50, because he scored 0.980 PPS while his teammates combined for 0.913. The issue here is that he is better than the "average" teammate, but we all know that Andrew Bynum and Paul Gasol are much more efficient, so you would think that the Lakers should indeed give more shots to them.

I promised to come back with a better approach based on lineup data and finally enough games have been played to have a (somewhat) reliable sample. I wanted to use lineups that have put up a minimum of 50 shots and back then there were like 3-5 lineups for each team to work with. I also figured each player within a lineup should have a minimum of 10 shots. The whole thing is still not very robust, we need a much larger sample, so draw conclusions carefully.

The approach is really simple: Within a given lineup, every player has a USG% (the % of team possessions he shot the ball, went to the FT line or turned it over) and a PPS value. A player that scores more effectively (higher PPS) should get more shots (higher USG%) and vice versa. I squared the PPS value of every player and redistributed the available shots in the lineup based on that. The best shot distribution obviously is to give all shots to the player who scores the most PPS, but that's not realistic because at some point teams will start to quadruple-team him. So I went with PPS*PPS here, which gives players with a higher PPS slightly more shots. I also ruled out putbacks and any fastbreak baskets as well as the center position at all. Centers have high PPS values, because they score around the basket on mostly assisted FGs that are created by other players. There are exceptions like Dwight Howard, Marcin Gortat or Andrew Bynum, but the position generally distorts the results, so they're out until I find a solution.

On average, 1542 shot were redistributed per team, the fewest for the Hornets (763), the most for the Thunder (2766). 38164 points could have turned into 41717 (an average raise of 9.31%), if the teams would have used their most efficient player in the given lineup more frequently. You'll find a list of 161 players (100+ shots) after the jump, the data suggests that 89 should shoot less, 72 more. USG% is the original usage rate, AdjUSG% the redistributed and Change% the percentage of shots the player should drop or add. Have fun with it.

So we got Kobe in the Top10, which is, after all, not surprising. The player that should get a fair amount of his shots is Gasol (and probably Bynum, but no C's as I've pointed out above). A very surprising appearance for Parker in my eyes, but he is surrounded by that much 3-point talent that the data suggests he should shoot less. Of course he creates most of the shots and therefore digs his own grave here, which is a good example why you should adjust for assisted field goals in some way. Another example: Battier and Korver (and Kidd for Dallas) top the list of guys who should shoot more. For the most part it makes sense though, but as said above: draw conclusions carefully and within reasonable context.