In late December, shortly after losing to Pitt, 112-106, Marshall coach Dan D’Antoni, in response to a question about his team taking too many 3-pointers, spoke for 125 seconds with the conviction and calm of a trial lawyer presenting a closing argument.
It was widely described on the internet as a rant, but it was more a sermon than anything, a brief lesson on the analytics of basketball and how the game has changed. The best kind of shot in basketball is a corner 3, he said. The next-best shot? Any other 3. From there, he explained the kind of post-up game he and many other coaches were raised to teach is inefficient and largely irrelevant.
D’Antoni’s words were a justification for the Thundering Herd’s style of play, one that some would consider unorthodox, but they just as easily could have provided guidance to the team down the hall at Petersen Events Center that night.
It’s not as if the Panthers don’t take enough 3s, actually they are quite good at doing that — but through 21 games, they are taking too many of the shots an increasingly analytics-driven sport would deem bad ones.
This season, only 31.1 percent of the Panthers’ field-goal attempts are coming at the rim, the area of the court where a shot is most likely to go in the basket. It’s the lowest such mark among the ACC’s 15 teams. In ACC play, a period in which Pitt has gone 1-7, only 25.3 percent of its field-goal attempts are at the rim.
Although the Panthers haven’t been particularly good on those shots, making just 47.8 percent of such attempts in that eight-game span, the lack of drives to the basket often means they’re too frequently settling for 2-point jumpers. It’s a shot considered among the worst in basketball, giving a team as many points as a layup or dunk while being converted at a significantly less successful rate.
Those shots have accounted for 30.3 percent of Pitt’s total field-goal attempts this season, with the team making only 39.1 percent of them. Over the past eight games, it has taken more of those inefficient shots (31.9 percent) while making them less frequently than it was before (34.3 percent).
“We talk a lot about not wanting to shoot the ball on the 3-point line or just inside the 3-point line,” Pitt coach Kevin Stallings said Monday on the weekly ACC coaches teleconference. “We would either rather take 3s or get it into the basket and get fouled or whatever. I think what we have to do is we have to create more opportunities where we give ourselves a chance for penetration.
“We don’t have a tremendous post presence. We have to create opportunities close to the goal in other ways other than just post feeds. We lack size. We’re constantly trying to create different opportunities and put different concepts that give these guys the chance to drive it to the goal, to pass it to the goal, to get it to the goal because that’s where you’re going to get fouled. If you’re a jump-shooting team, you’re not going to get to the foul line enough, and we’re a team that needs to get to the foul line quite a bit.”
The lack of size, at least in the form of a traditional big man, Stallings referenced has existed for much of the season and been exacerbated in the current six-game losing streak heading into a matchup tonightat No. 12 North Carolina.
Michael Young, the team’s tallest starter at 6 feet 9, is a prolific scorer with a points-per-game average of 20.3, but only 27.7 percent of his shots this season have come at the rim. Fellow forward Sheldon Jeter has taken a few more shots closer to the basket, but he has made just 46.3 percent. Among the team’s starters, the player with the highest percentage of shots at the rim is senior Chris Jones (.592), a 6-foot-6 guard who doesn’t possess the kind of speed and shiftiness to be an omnipresent threat to get to the rim and open up opposing defenses.
With just five healthy scholarship players averaging more than 3 points per game, all of whom are 6-6 or taller, Stallings will have to be creative to get Pitt consistent close-range shots, from utilizing an array of screens to drawing up more backdoor cuts.
In the meantime, his team isn’t doomed from an analytics standpoint. This season, 38.6 percent of its shots have been 3s, the third-highest mark in the ACC. On a shot worth 50 percent more points, it is shooting 36.9 percent, which makes the prevalence of 2-point jumpers all the more baffling.
Even the players — those responsible for the lopsided figures — know their offensive approach has to change if the team’s fortunes have any chance of doing so, as well.
“When the jump shot is not falling, we have to drive the basketball and create contact,” guard Jamel Artis said Saturday after a loss to Clemson. “We did that in the second half. We got some foul-line shots and some free throws. We were able to get some easy points. When the jump shot is not falling, we have to get to the rim and get easy layups.”
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG.
First Published: January 31, 2017, 5:00 a.m.
