Atlanta Hawks '97-98

It's a stupid question in some sense. A true coach would set something up for his best player, regardless of what those percentages say. As your narrator for this little quiz, I force you to choose between taking a two-point shot or a three. No rebounds possible.

Made up your mind?

If you're an engineer and you probably are since this is the web and only engineers get their basketball jollies off the web, you did a little math to see that the expected number of points for the two alternatives are 1.14 for a trey and 0.96 for a two-pointer.

If you're a pretty good engineer, you realized that the expected number of points doesn't really matter here, just winning the game. In this case, you said that taking a three means a 38% chance of winning the game and a 62% chance of losing. Taking a two means a 48% chance of going to overtime, where the odds are about 50%, giving an overall chance of winning the game of 24%.

If you're a really good engineer or someone who thinks beyond the math, you realized that those percentages mean almost nothing in this situation. The reason those percentages mean nothing is competition.

Competition spoils those percentages, making anything that you may have calculated moot. If there were some obvious advantage to a two-point shot or to a three-point shot, the defense would know it just as well as the offense and would take measures to eliminate that advantage.

If you insist on numbers, the way to look at this is that the offense's two-point percentage increases and their three-point percentage decreases until both strategies have the same expected chance of winning the game. For example, one might expect the three-point percentage to drop to 30%, but the two-point percentage to increase to 60%, which puts the offensive team's chance of winning at about 30%. (This is necessarily less than the 38% before for the trey and greater than the 24% for the two.)

That is game theory. Given time, teams will recognize a dominant strategy like this and equalize the odds a lot better.

This is what happened with the closer three point line. In the season before the NBA moved the line in, 1994, NBA offenses floundered, posting the worst ratings since '83. The '94 Knicks' version of violent but legal defense was too dominant. The league reasoned that moving the three point line in would improve offense.

The league was right. The closer line gave offenses an advantage that hadn't been there before. As a result, offenses improved in '95 to a record high in efficiency. However, after a couple years, defenses adjusted and by last year had forced offenses back down to a level just above what they were in '94.

...So What Does This Have To Do With Atlanta?...

The Hawks are one of the teams that will most feel the change in the three point line. They had one of the most proficient pair of three-point shooters with both starting guards Steve Smith and Mookie Blaylock filling it up. And both of those guys benefitted from the closer line.

The extra 1 ft 9 inches closer to the basket allowed these two to make 120 more threes in '95 than in '94. That is about 120 extra points that the Hawks will presumably lose in '98, or about 4 games.

That is the primary reason I have the Hawks declining slightly this season. Otherwise, this team is as good as it was last year, perhaps better with the injuries striking Chicago.