Here are the NBA's Most Efficient Shooters from Beyond Half Court
An April Fool's Day Special
This year for April Fool’s Day, for one day only I will become a basketball themed data newsletter. If you want to follow a real basketball themed data newsletter, I highly recommend The F5 by Owen Phillips. He makes some stunning visualizations in R and he even publishes tutorials for them so you can try them out at home.
Today, I will be using The F5’s shot chart tutorial found here to see who the most efficient scorers in the NBA are from beyond the half court line.
I won’t share the code because it’s paywalled on The F5, but I took Owen’s original DuckDB query that searches for 3 point shot volume and edited the shot distance to be behind half court. Then, I used his ggplot visualization of the lines on a basketball court and mirrored it to the other side to give the visualization a full court appearance instead of half court, and messed around with the colors. Here are the results:
The player with the largest number of shot attempts beyond 50 feet is…
Most recently, this shot from The Joker helped his efficiency stats. Jokic has the most half court and beyond shot attempts by far in the NBA, with 16 total attempts. He’s only shooting 6.25% from beyond half court though, so he isn’t out most efficient shooter from this range. The most efficient shooter from beyond half court is…
AJ Green of the Milwaukee Bucks, who I assume has some deep 3 point attempts giving him two large peaks on the heat map. Green is 1/1 on attempts beyond half court this year, shooting a blistering 100% from beyond the line. Here’s that shot.
In second place, shooting 50% from beyond the line is…
AJ Green’s teammate Kyle Kuzma, who is 1 for 2 on half court shots this year. Here’s his make. Doc Rivers technically coaches the team that is dominating the efficiency metrics of an entire area of the court.
Tied with Kuzma shooting 50% from beyond the line is…
The deep ball legend Steph Curry, who is also 1 for 2 on the season. Here’s his make. The last player shooting 50% from beyond the line this year, and our final player to make a half court shot this season is…
Jake LaRavia of the Memphis Grizzlies. Here’s his crazy half court shot that occurred funnily enough against the Golden State Warriors.
That’s all I have for today, folks. Short and sweet. Shoutout to The F5 for some great R tutorials and content overall, hope everyone has a great April Fool’s Day.