Hot streaks and cold shooting

There has been some hot shooting in this year’s playoffs. The Cleveland Cavaliers beat the record for most 3PM in a game and have shot 46.2% from 3 as a team, which is ridiculous. In Miami, Luol Deng and Dwyane Wade has been flaming hot from distance.

With so much of playoff success resting on this sort of cluster of hot shooting, it’s worth examining in slightly more detail. To that end, I studied the shooting performance of every player over the last six postseasons to determine who most over- and underperformed, when it comes to three-point shooting.

Comparing 3FG% in the playoffs with the career shooting percentage for all players[1. Minimum 15 3PA.] I have also factored in the number of attempts. While Andre Iguodala shot 53.3% in the 2013-14 playoffs (about +20% his career average), he only did so on 15 attempts and so only connected on about 3 “extra” threes above expectation. I want to find the shooters who drained a lot more threes than could be expected. So I did:

The plot above shows the Top 9 made three-point shots over expected in the last six season. Stephen Jackson leads the pack by some distance with the way he was shooting in the 2011-12 playoffs.[2 26/43 = 60.5% shooting.] Full disclosure, I could not remember Captain Jack being that hot, before I went back and re-read some of the stories from that year. I had expected that he might have cooled off in the 4 straight games, that the Spurs lost to the Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, but on the contrary he shot 15/21 – 71.4%! – from deep in those four games.

Raptors-fans will also remember Paul Pierce’s hot shooting from last year’ playoffs.

Four players from this year’s playoffs are represented in the plot. Kyrie Irving and JR Smith have together hit around 16.5 extra threes in Cleveland’s 8 games. There is no reason to expect those totals to decrease significantly with more games. Even if players go back to shooting at their “normal” levels, they have already “banked” those above-expectation threes, and reverting to the mean only results in shooting at normal levels going forward, not some sort of “law of large numbers” correction for past events.

When it comes to cold streaks only one (unsurprising) name from this year’s postseason is found among the bottom:

Kyle Lowry is shooting 21.5% from 3 this year. Fun fact: He shot 21.7% last year in Toronto’s 4 straight losses to the Wizards.

LeBron James’s struggles from last year are also a clear outlier. So far this season he hit only 12 of 38 for 31.6% which puts him just a single three behind what we would expect if he was hitting his career average thus far.