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The NBA has evolved into a three point heavy league. Players like Steph Curry shoot and make a lot of threes. This project examines whether three-point shooting gives NBA teams an advantage and increases their chances of winning.
For this project I collected stats of all 30 NBA teams over the last 3 years. The stats included regular-season wins, three-pointers made per game, three-point attempts per game, three-point percentage, and playoff results. These stats led to some surprising results.
To determine if Three Point shooting actually improves success, I used the Pearson correlation coefficient to determine the correlation between three point shooting and regular season and postseason success. How the Correlation effect works is that a correlation to 1 means there is a strong positive correlation, while if its closer to 0 then its a weak no correlation. This gave me the ability to see which three-point shooting statistics were most correlated with the success of a team.
After calculating correlations between shooting statistics and team success, I found that the strongest correlations were between three-point percentage and field-goal percentage. Three-point percentage had a correlation of 0.65, while field-goal percentage had a correlation of 0.64. What this indicates is that more efficient shooting teams are more likely to be successful during the regular season. This shows that not only is three-point percentage important, but overall field-goal percentage is just as important.
However, field goal and three-point attempts were less important. Three-point attempts had a 0.31 correlation coefficient, while field goal attempts had an abysmal 0.09 correlation. This shows that simply attempting more shots does not necessarily lead to more success.
In conclusion, the data shows that three-point percentage and field-goal percentage are both strongly related to NBA teams winning. However, simply taking more shots does not appear to give teams the same advantage. This shows that for an NBA team to be successful, making shots efficiently is more important than just taking more shots.
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