RE: The basketball team that never takes a bad shot
The Basketball Team That Never Takes a Bad Shot
The NBA’s most efficient offenses seek out layups and threes. A high school in Minnesota takes the idea to the extreme.
By Ben Cohen
PINE CITY, Minn.—Jake Rademacher made a mid-range jumper in a recent high-school basketball game. But as soon as the ball left his hands, even before it banked in, Rademacher knew it was a bad shot. And his team doesn’t take bad shots.
Pine City High School seeks out only the most valuable shots in basketball: from underneath the rim or beyond the 3-point line. They play as if they’re allergic to all the space in between.
On the night that Rademacher accidentally made his shot from the mid-range, Pine City attempted 64 field goals, and 62 were layups or threes. It was a remarkably ordinary game for the Dragons. Mid-range shots—the sport’s least efficient—account for only 4.2% of Pine City’s attempts. That’s lower than any NBA team or Division-I men’s college team and almost every high-school team in the nation.
“In all honesty,” said Pine City coach Kyle Allen, “that’s even higher than we want it to be.”
A high school basketball team in Pine City, Minn., almost exclusively shoots 3-pointers and layups—the game's most valuable shots. Here's a look at attempts and scores by the Dragons in a recent game. Photo: Angela Jimenez for The Wall Street Journal
Pine City has become so obsessed with efficiency that its players don’t bother looking at the basket if they’re not in the paint or behind the arc. It can be jarring to watch them play this way. But it’s why this high-school team in rural Minnesota might be the future of basketball.
The understanding of how basketball shots are valued has radically shifted in recent years and upended strategy at every level of the game. It explains why the sport has evolved in favor of players who can make 3-pointers and teams built around taking advantage of high-percentage shots. It also suggests where the sport is going—except the Pine City Dragons are already there.
Like the savviest college and NBA teams, Pine City studied the numbers, realized that certain shots are worth more than others and changed its game plan to take as many of those shots as possible. In a perfect game, they would only take those shots.
“That’s how you should play,” said Houston Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni. “Hopefully they’re successful. But the biggest thing is: Are they better than what they would be?”
They are. This intelligent shooting is the primary reason that Pine City has a 12-4 record this season without starting anyone who is taller than 6-foot-2.
Sophomore Nick Hansmann of the Pine City Dragons takes a 3-pointer.
Sophomore Nick Hansmann of the Pine City Dragons takes a 3-pointer. PHOTO: ANGELA JIMENEZ FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Pine City is simply taking to the extreme an idea that has smitten the NBA. The frequency of mid-range field goals—long shots with lousy value because they’re still worth two points—has decreased in every season for the last decade, and this year is responsible for 10 of the 25 teams in history with the lowest reliances on mid-range shots. It also has produced the team with the fewest inefficient shots of all time: 8.6% of the Rockets’ field-goal attempts come from this part of the court.
Houston star James Harden is so careful about his shots that free throws, layups and threes account for 87% of his points. The most electrifying player in college basketball is even more selective. Those highly efficient shots comprise 99% of UCLA freshman Lonzo Ball’s points, according to hoop-math.com.
But no team is as picky as Pine City. And that’s on purpose.
Allen, a 29-year-old teacher, is young enough that he was influenced by “Moneyball” in his formative years as a fan and soon embraced a data-driven approach to sports. After he became Pine City’s coach, he spent most of his budget on the services of Krossover, a company that analyzes game film to create personalized statistics for even tiny high schools in the middle of Minnesota. Pine City’s players and coaches suddenly had access to helpful information—like customized video clips, advanced box scores and detailed shot charts—that was previously only available to NBA teams.
Pine City takes 59% of its shots from behind the 3-point line because it makes sense statistically. But it’s also because Allen believes it’s a more alluring style of play. “You don’t find a lot of kids who come in and work on post moves for an hour,” he said. “But I’ve got kids who will put up 500 threes for an hour like it’s no big deal.”
That’s not much of an exaggeration. Pine City’s players are tasked with shooting hundreds of threes in practice every day. To be sure, Allen says, they might be playing a different, more conventional way if the Dragons had a dominant big man.
Coach Kyle Allen gives a pep talk to his Pine City Dragons.
Coach Kyle Allen gives a pep talk to his Pine City Dragons. PHOTO: ANGELA JIMENEZ FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“But overwhelmingly you’re not seeing that player come through,” Allen said. “We haven’t really seen that since Shaq.”
There is one school that doesn’t share this problem of Pine City’s. The starting center for the Crossroads School’s basketball team in Santa Monica, Calif., happens to be a 6-foot-10 teen named Shareef O’Neal. He’s the son of Shaquille O’Neal.
As it turns out, Crossroads relies on the 3-pointer less than almost every one of the nearly 3,000 boys teams that use Krossover, according to the company’s data. But when they do shoot from deep, they get the ball to their best shooter: Shareef O’Neal. Even the son of Shaquille O’Neal shoots threes now. As he recently told Kevin Garnett: “He’s more of a KG than he is a Shaq.”
Pine City has neither a KG nor a Shaq. In fact, by almost any measure, this place smack in between Minneapolis and Duluth is an unlikely site for a basketball laboratory. The school itself is known for its arts, not sports, and has one varsity basketball court but two varsity auditoriums. “Music reigns here,” Allen said.
It has been forced to get creative about basketball funding, too. Several years ago, Pine City applied for a grant from a local endowment to purchase shooting machines, which have paid off: The Dragons broke Minnesota’s state records for 3-pointers last season.
The Pine City Dragons’ banner celebrating their state record three-point season in 2015-2016.
The Pine City Dragons’ banner celebrating their state record three-point season in 2015-2016. PHOTO: ANGELA JIMENEZ FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
By now it has become intuition for Pine City’s players to exploit the game’s most valuable shots. But when they need a reminder to avoid the mid-range, all they have to do is look down at their court. The paint area and land beyond the 3-point line are the color of classic hardwood. The area in between is emerald green. The dreaded part of the floor actually looks different here.
As a result of their mid-range apathy, the Dragons’ shot charts resemble the bottom of a teenager’s face. The shots near the hoop are the nose. The arc of threes form a smile. The mid-range shots are unwanted spots of acne.
Allen barely has to mention offense in their pre-game film sessions anymore. Instead, as the players ate buckets of chicken wings last week, he showed them clips of defense, reminded players where to position themselves for rebounds and instructed Pine City’s boys to ignore a rumor the other team’s star wasn’t playing, which began when he was spotted wearing a cast on Snapchat.
Of course, Pine City’s strategy doesn’t always work. The obvious downside is that while NBA teams miss more 3-pointers than they make, high-school teams miss even more often. That’s what happened last week when the Dragons lost to Minnesota’s reigning state champions: the Braham Bombers.
After the game, Allen stared at the iPad that had tracked Pine City’s stats. He saw that his team had sunk a total of seven 3-pointers.
“Seven for… something,” he said. “A lot.”
The more exact number was 37—their worst shooting night in several years. But the players and coaches weren’t discouraged. Allen assured the Dragons in the locker room that there would always be games when their shots didn’t go in. “The percentages even out,” he said. And the percentages would always be on their side.
|
/
The basketball team that never takes a bad shot
