Ever wonder where a basketball players "hot spot" is? Or how many times Kevin Durant dribbles before he shoots? How about the distance Kobe Bryant runs in a game?
Now we know thanks to Kirk Goldsberry! Kirk, a visiting scholar of geography at Harvard (now Linsanity makes sense!), creates visual maps based on the performance of NBA players to answer questions such as, "Who is the best shooter in the NBA?"
"To do this, Goldsberry divided the area from just behind the 3-point line down to the rim into 1,284 “shooting cells,” and looked at how players shot during every N.B.A. game between 2006 and 2011. Not a single player took a shot from every spot on the floor. (Kobe Bryant came the closest, shooting from 1,071 places. ) Then, Goldsberry looked at which players averaged more than one point per attempt from the greatest percentage of the places they shot from." - Joshua Brustein
According to this formula, Steve Nash and Ray Allen were the best shooters in the league.
Spatial analysis like this is important and I believe more and more coaches will contact people like Kirk to improve their player's performance and increase their win percentage.
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