NBA Season Preview 2017-18: Just keep shooting, Stephen Curry

This is old news, but Stephen Curry is simply on track to be the greatest shooter to exist; he may have already have grabbed the title. His 3-point rate has essentially increased (or, remained equal) since his rookie year, and with this, his power has strengthened.

Defenses know he’s likely to take a shot of high expected value at any moment which often gives his teammates ample space for their shots.

A prime example of Steph’s profound gravity is this transition possession in the NBA Finals. The Cavaliers seem to assume that Curry has greater than a two-thirds chance of making a open corner 3-pointer in transition. So, they play a mini-game of expected value. They project that a Durant dunk is less valuable than a Steph three, and thus, Curry picks up a gravitational assist.

Stephen has off-nights but perplexes the opposition anyway. We’ve seen it with regularity. So, the first question I wanted to tackle, which was “given a few statistical factors, how many 3-pointers can we expect Stephen to miss in a game?”

With negative binomial regression, I chose to use categorical variables such as home/road game, win/loss and continuous, independent variables, such as minutes played and opponent margin of victory. I then tested the statistical significance of each.

Unfortunately, margin of victory, which seemed to be an intriguing independent variable tested a bit worse than the combination of minutes and win/loss outcome. It appears that Stephen Curry 3-point misses aren’t greatly dependent upon the competition.

While calculating the approximate 3-point attempts missed over a 0-48 minute period and the upper/lower limits via a 98 percent confidence for a chart, I found an intriguing result. Though it’s expected that Stephen misses more 3s the longer he plays, Curry often misses more in wins!

This could be a product of the psychological freedom being up in a game brings (it might factor in a bit). He will have the liberty to take momentum-seizing attempts and 3-pointers that likely rank lower on Krishna Narsu’s KOBE scale; he’s not threatened by the opposition and may dabble in isolation playtypes to embarrass the defender and motivate the crowd.

Because the “missed 3s” graphic provides us with information concerning wins/losses and how those reflect in Stephen’s missed 3s tally, I had to seek further justification for why Steph should continue taking shots even during a dry spell.

I looked into the effect of Curry’s 3-point volume and how it relates to the Warriors’ offensive rating while Steph is on-court. To do this, I gathered the box score 3-point shot attempts in every NBA game he’s played and accounted for whether the game was at home or on the road. And once again, with negative binomial regression, I rendered an estimation the Warriors’ offensive rating given Curry’s activity from beyond the arc.

The Warriors are understandably hindered on the road, and the ribbon reflects that. When on the road, there’s a 5.5 percent decrease in offensive rating, relative to home games. Additionally, there’s a 1.9 percent increase in offensive rating for every unit increase in 3-point attempts per game.

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Hypothetically, holding all other variables equal, one additional Steph 3-point attempt would take an offense that scores 110 points per 100 possessions while he’s on-court to one that score 112.09 points per 100 possessions.

The idea of Stephen Curry taking a slew of truly detrimental looks is almost impractical. It’s already preferable to take contested 3s to open mid-range jumpers under many circumstances. Combine this reasoning with Steph’s outlier accuracy from downtown and it’s understandable why he’s considered a threat as soon as he crosses halfcourt. You should certainly keep shooting this season, Steph.