Rejected: Hoop Dreams Dashed by Waiting Too Long to Shoot

For the record, I'm not a basketball player. I dabbled in it a bit when I was younger, but I certainly didn't play it in college or as a professional. But I am a fan, having watched more than my fair share of basketball over the years, and I think this guy is on to something.

This guy is a physics researcher at a certain Midwestern university. This guy has recently published a paper detailing the results of a crunch-the-numbers study he did focusing on NBA players and the shots that they take at the end of the game. Specifically, this guy wanted to know if the players were waiting long enough or too long or not long enough before taking that final shot, with the game on the line. (Obviously, we're talking about game-winners here, not a 10-point lead.)

It's a balancing act, of course, between the need to take or defend the lead and the need to keep the other team from getting the ball. If your team has the ball and is ahead, then you probably want to hold the ball as long as you can, to defend the lead. The NBA and college games have a shot clock, though, so the Four Corners offense is not an option. Still, you want to take some time off the clock, so the opposing team doesn't have forever and a day to set up a dynamite play that will result in the winning shot.

It's a more straightforward proposition when your team is behind in the scoring: Your team has to score or they lose. That tends to up the ante a bit, but the tendency is still there to dawdle, as it were, running time off the clock to ensure that if it's not literally the last shot, it's the last effective shot.

But such play has a price, and it is this: The more the time remaining wanes, the more intensity the defensive team shows and the more pressure is on the team with the ball, even if they have the lead. With the game on the line, players on defense pick up their tired arms, pick up the speed of their footfalls, and elevate their minds and bodies in a surge of victory-fueled adrenaline. Thus, as the final buzzer gets closer, it actually gets harder for the team with the ball. Nearly every basketball arena has at least two massive play clocks now, so the players all know how much time is left in the game. 

Little time remaining leaves little room for error, exacerbating an already growing squeeze by the suddenly energized defensive team; as such, it can actually be harder for the team with the ball to get a decent shot off because they've little or no time for Plan B. 

It's all well and good to draw up the perfect play and execute it to perfection, but the ball still has to go in the hoop (if you're behind). Somebody still has to make a shot. The less time the team has, the harder the shot is to hit because the player will subconsciously put pressure on himself or herself, and that's even more of an obstacle. And if you miss, you have to get the rebound, reset, and go through it all again — or else you get a wild shot off the rebound and you're still stuck with too little time.

It would be far better, in this writer's opinion, for the team with the intention of scoring to make sure that they get one or two good looks and actually make the basket, ensuring the lead, rather than trying to run out the clock, and then end up running out of time for anything but a desperation shot. After all, once you have the lead, the other team still has to score in order to tie or go ahead. Then, the pressure is on them.

It's a bit more straightforward if you have the lead and the ball, since you can run the clock all the way down without scoring at all, although again the preference should always beto score, since that increases the lead, in some cases putting it out of reach.

Anyway, back to this guy. So he crunched a lot of numbers and adapted a lot of formulas and produced a lot of graphs and made a lot of words and numbers out of the hypothesis that there is indeed a "waited too long" threshold. His calculations convinced him that NBA players who wait too long cost their teams an average of 4.5 points a game. And in some cases, those 4.5 points are the difference between a win and a loss.

Basketball features no such 4.5-point shot, of course, so you have to remember that that figure is the result of a lot of number-crunching and that other results were 1 point, 2 points, 8 points, etc. It's an average, the result of statistical analysis, but it points to a trend, which is that players are holding on to the ball a bit too long and, in some cases, their (in)actions are costing their teams wins.

If you want to read the whole thing, it's here. 

I'm going with my gut: shoot the ball already, and play good defense. It's the only way to score.