UConn 3 PT % Leaders

[Huskyforlife]

Surprisingly, this is almost exactly where Tyrese was at at this point in the season last year. He was shooting 43% through the first 10 games and went 3-22 in the last 12 which dropped him to 32% for the year. It would be really hard to have a worse stretch of games this year, but it is fair to expect his number to drop off some the rest of the season.

Surprised nobody has mentioned this.

 

[karstenkibbe]

Martin is really the best surprise here in my eyes. Good for Akok and Jackson, but this is a very small sample for both consisting entirely of wide open looks.

It’s actually pretty disheartening to see your two biggest volume shooters doing as poorly as Cole and Polley have, but the low volume guys are picking up the slack in aggregate.

I think both bookends of this list are going to have to meet somewhere in the middle to keep our team percentage up the rest of the season. The top part is probably unsustainable and the bottom part has a good amount of room for improvement.

I still wish UConn could have added Anglin in their 2022 class. It would be nice knowing we have a guard who can really shoot in our pipeline.

I mentioned the Anglin thing a few days ago in response to someone posting the list of McD’s All-American finalists from the Northeast. I truly believe we should have prioritized him for ‘22. Would have been a critical piece of the puzzle.

 

[ToolzieFan]

It actually takes more than a full NBA season for 3pt% to stabilize. It's more like a full career in college (or 2 years for really voluminous shooters). There's a LOT of variance in it, as this whole thread indicates. Shooting stroke can also be like a golf stroke where guys just lose it for a while and slump, and also people improve over the off-seasons, or have their roles and volume (and thus difficulty of shots) dramatically increase. So really, it never stabilizes in college. Polley with the one COVID shortened year and one injury shortened year is only a little over halfway to stabilizing.

As to your likelihood of shots model, there's actually 2 variables. The skill of the shooter and the difficulty of the shot (also called shot quality). So you'd expect Akok to make 12 average difficulty shots out of 23 only 4% of the time. But he pretty much takes only in rhythm open catch and shoot 3 pointers, which are probably closer to 40-50% makes for 35% average shooters.

Yeah, I totally get that degree of difficulty is a huge variable that I haven’t (and can’t) take into account. I wouldn’t expect 21 or 23 shots to tell us too much, but even if Akok is really a 40% shooter only on wide open, catch-and-shoot threes, I’ll take it.

The other factor is defense. Right now, Andre Jackson has been more or less allowed to shoot threes. If he makes a few more, they’ll start to cover him tighter, and his percentage will likely drop. Of course, that should open up other offensive opportunities. All of these are reasons why basketball statistics can be harder to make sense of than baseball statistics.

 

[navery12]

That was the next thing I wanted to look at was the splits against good opponents, but didn't get a chance to do yet. I'll post that later

I considered "high level" games Atlantis, WVU, St Bonaventure, PC, Seton Hall. Not really a significant difference other than Cole, but matches what @auror said above

Cole - 18/48 38% in high level and 12/42 29% in low level

Polley - 13/40 33% and 14/39 36%

Hawkins - 6/18 33% and 6/17 35%

 

[jayteeman]

You could say the worse shooting percentage comes from the hardest working defender....but then there is Polley.

 

[HuskyHawk]

I expected Akok to shoot better from 3 (not this well!), and Cole being low isn’t surprising based on his volume, but on the whole, this is indeed very surprising. And yes, I understand that some of these percentages can be explained by small sample sizes and degree of difficulty.

So the top 3 are the guys most of this board said couldn’t shoot. I find it entirely predictable. Really disappointed that Gaff isn‘t shooting better, and more often. Hoped he’d become a decent SG option.