Mid-range analysis of Euroleague

The play style of basketball has evolved over the past two decades. Mid-range shots have drastically decreased in favour of more efficient three-point attempts in the NBA, an excellent overview of the topic is presented in the book Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA by Kirk Goldsberry.

However, how are things evolving in European basketball and Euroleague? Here, I don’t aim to examine any historical patterns over the years (which will be the subject of another blogpost), but I rather focus on the impact of volume of mid-range shots on a team’s performance in the first half of the 2023-2024 Euroleague season (analysis will be updated as the season progresses). The analysis can be found on this GitHub notebook.

This analysis was motivated simply by occasionally plotting the shooting charts of teams, see for example this tweet, where I started to notice a pattern that winning teams shoot far fewer mid-range buckets than the losing team. However, this observation was based on a handful of games and I wanted to properly examine the subject.

In summary, I am trying to address the following hypothesis; Shooting fewer mid-range attempts increases the probability of winning.

Definition of mid-range

Traditionally, the mid-range shot is defined as any shooting attempt outside the key area and inside the three-point arc. We plot all mid-range shots of the first half of the season 2023-2024 in the following figure.

Fig. 1: Mid-range shots of the first half of the 2023-2024 season

Data collection

The shooting data is collected using the Euroleague Python API for all games in the fist half of the 2023-2024 season. A sample of the data is shown below.

Fig. 2: Sample of the shooting data

Mid-range shooting by team

First, we estimate the percentage of mid-range shots out of total field goals (FGs) by team, see next figure. Red Star, Real Madrid and Olympiacos take the least mid-range attempts, with less than 7.2% of their total FG attempts being mid-range. On the other hand, Valencia, Partizan, Bayern and Monaco attempt the most mid-range shots with more than 13.2% of their FGs.

Fig. 3: Percentage of mid-range shots from total field goals by each team until round 17 of season 2023-2024.

Impact on teams performance

Next, we search for correlations between a teams’ percentage of midrange volume to their win percentage so far in the season. The correlation value is $-0.095$, negative, but very weak.

Also, the linear relationship between between mid-range percentage and win percentage, see next figure, where the slope of the trend line is negative, but still very low in absolute value, and has no statistical significance.

Fig. 4: Percentage of mid-range shots against the win percentage

Finally, we estimate the probability for a team to win when it shoots fewer mid-range attempts from their opponent. To estimate this, we record which team won and which team shot fewer mid-range attempts in each game. The probability of a team to win while shooting fewer mid-range is 0.48.

From the above, we conclude that there is no strong direct relationship between mid-range volume and team performance. This analysis will be updated towards the end of the season.

Mid-range shooting by player

Which players are the most prolific mid-range shooters? We estimate the percentage of mid-range shots taken relative to the total FGs attempted by the player (with minimum of 80 FGs). Here are the top 10 mid-range shooters based on relative volume of their shots.

We observe that among the top 5 are players from the cluster of high volume mid-range teams, Monaco, Valencia, Partizan and Bayern.

Monaco, Partizan and Valencia have players of the quality of John Brown, Mike James, Brandon Davies and Kevin Punter who are mid-range specialists and exploit their high efficiency from the mid-range distance.

Conclusion

There seems to be no relationship between mid-range attempts volume and team performance (expressed via the win percentage). Hence, my hypothesis cannot be validated from this season’s data. Teams with high mid-range volume have efficient mid-range shooters and seem to exploit their efficiency.

Bonus

As a bonus, we present the leading scorers by zone (as defined by the shoti data) for Euroleague until round 17 (first half of the season) 2023-2024.

Poirier is dominant under the rim. Toko Shengelia is dominant in the low post area. Mike James is the king of the right side of mid range.

Fig. 5: Leading scorers by zone (first half of 2023-2024 season)