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The Boston Celtics and Dallas Mavericks made the 2024 NBA Finals as very different teams linked by one strategic goal: fire away from downtown. They ranked first and second in the NBA last season in 3-point attempt rate, and other teams are now getting in line to emulate them.
The NBA’s 3-point revolution isn’t over just yet. The average team took 44% of its shots from behind the arc in the 2024 exhibition games, which is the highest rate ever in the preseason. For context, the league-wide rate has never surpassed 40% in any regular season.
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After gradually increasing for decades, the frequency of 3-pointers in the NBA began to take off in the 2012-13 season, when 24.4% of shots were 3s, and continued until around the 2019-20 season, when that number rose all the way to 38.4%. The past four seasons have seen a plateau in that trend, but 2024-25 may prove different.
Under the encouragement of analytically inclined head coach Joe Mazzulla, the defending champion Celtics are hoping to jack up even more long–range shots than last year. In the preseason, 55.4% of the team’s shots were 3s, which would not only blow their league-leading rate from last season of 47.1% out of the water, but also shatter the all-time record set by James Harden’s Houston Rockets in 2019.
So what? It’s just preseason, right? According to research by Owen Phillips, 3-point attempt rate has the second strongest correlation between the preseason and regular season out of 25 team metrics he tracked since 2019.
When teams decide to hoist more threes, they usually practice that concept in the preseason. Last year, for instance, the teams that finished first through fifth in the regular season 3-point attempt rate all ranked in the top 10 during the preseason as well. The Celtics took the most threes in both settings.
“I love 3-pointers,” Mazzulla said at a press conference during his first season at the helm in 2022. “I like math.”
The Golden State Warriors, who won the championship in 2022 after finishing second in the league in regular season 3-point attempt rate, are looking to reinvest in that area of the…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/3-crowd-expect-even-more-195918382.html
Author : Sportico
Publish date : 2024-10-22 19:59:00
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