[BostonCard]

Live by the three…

BC

We shot 5/20 (25%) from the 3, several of the misses were of the in-and-out variety.  Had we shot 8/20, which would have been very good, but still a much lower percentage than the first three games, it would have been a 78-56 win (ignoring second order effects), which would have felt like much less of a close game.

This is the challenge with being three-point dependent; although most advanced analytics say that the expected value of a three point shot is higher than a two point shot in most circumstances, it does increase the variance, so a bad shooting day is going to affect you more.

For math geeks:
Imagine a team that shoots 45% from 2 and 33% from 3.  The expected points are 0.9 pts from 2 and 1 from 3.  But the SD around that is ±1 .41 points from 3 and ±0.995 from 2, so you are more prone to particularly bad days of shooting if you shoot a lot of threes and are unlucky.

[BostonCard]

Live by the three…

BC

We shot 5/20 (25%) from the 3, several of the misses were of the in-and-out variety.  Had we shot 8/20, which would have been very good, but still a much lower percentage than the first three games, it would have been a 78-56 win (ignoring second order effects), which would have felt like much less of a close game.

This is the challenge with being three-point dependent; although most advanced analytics say that the expected value of a three point shot is higher than a two point shot in most circumstances, it does increase the variance, so a bad shooting day is going to affect you more.

For math geeks:
Imagine a team that shoots 45% from 2 and 33% from 3.  The expected points are 0.9 pts from 2 and 1 from 3.  But the SD around that is ±1 .41 points from 3 and ±0.995 from 2, so you are more prone to particularly bad days of shooting if you shoot a lot of threes and are unlucky.