SPRING 2022, VOLUME 4

AUTHORS

Andrew Castle, University of Pennsylvania (Capstone)
Grant Cho, University of Pennsylvania (Capstone)
David Fan, University of Pennsylvania (Capstone)

ABSTRACT

NBA games have been changing. In particular, such play style shift, through ’positionless’ basketball, has often been associated with more three- pointer attempts and fewer inefficient mid-range shots. However, while such aggregate trend is trivial to analyze, we pose three outstanding questions that the aggregated trend fails to encapsulate.

First, is that there is a growing volume of three-point specialists coming into the league. Second, is that there is a change in play style across all players. Third, is that such trend is heterogeneous across top and bottom performing teams. Through player clusters created from a Finite Mixture Multinomial model, we found that the overall shift towards three-pointers seen in the NBA is attributable both to a growing volume of rookies who are focused on predominantly shooting threes and a more general trend where all-around players are transitioning to become three-point specialist, albeit decreasing over time.

In addition, while both the top and bottom performing teams subscribe to similar trends of acquiring more three-point shooters, we do see weak evidence suggesting that top teams appear to be capturing this trend at a faster rate.