the problem of shot selection in basketball选择的篮球的问题.pdfVIP

The Problem of Shot Selection in Basketball Brian Skinner* Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America Abstract In basketball, every time the offense produces a shot opportunity the player with the ball must decide whether the shot is worth taking. In this article, I explore the question of when a team should shoot and when they should pass up the shot by considering a simple theoretical model of the shot selection process, in which the quality of shot opportunities generated by the offense is assumed to fall randomly within a uniform distribution. Within this model I derive an answer to the question ‘‘how likely must the shot be to go in before the player should take it?’’ and I show that this lower cutoff for shot qualityf depends crucially on the number n of shot opportunities remaining (say, before the shot clock expires), with larger n demanding that only higher-quality shots should be taken. The function f (n) is also derived in the presence of a finite turnover rate and used to predict the shooting rate of an optimal-shooting team as a function of time. The theoretical prediction for the optimal shooting rate is compared to data from the National Basketball Association (NBA). The comparison highlights some limitations of the theoretical model, while also suggesting that NBA teams may be overly reluctant to shoot the ball early in the shot clock. Citation: Skinner B (2012) The Problem of Shot Selection in Basketball. PLoS ONE 7(1): e30776. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030776 Editor: Matjaz Perc, University of Maribor, Slovenia Received November 19, 2011; Accepted December 23, 2011; Published January 25, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Brian Skinner. This is an open-access article distributed under the