Noah went from a 29% to a 35% 3 point shooter in one game.
(1) I told you guys that if nothing else, he can shoot.
(2) This is a pretty good demonstration of the extreme noise level in small samples and why you shouldn't take single season 3 point percentages all that seriously.
Homogenized stats are deceiving. If a team is shooting 25% from three on the season, it looks bad. But it doesn’t work that way for individual games.
If a team shoots 4-16 from the arc in each of two games, they are less likely to win either one, but if they shoot 2-16 in the first game and 6-16 in the second game, they’re more likely to win the second game and go 1-1.
When evaluating a player, I prefer to look at how many times his positive performance directly contributed to a win, minus those times his negative performance directly contributed to a loss (if a player has a ‘positive’ performance in a loss, he gets a neutral grade for that game, and similarly for a player that has a ‘negative’ performance in a win).
In Noah’s case, he directly contributed a net positive performance in least 2 very important (Quad 1) wins: at SHU and at home vs Wisconsin (I haven’t analyzed this for every game and every player, just making an anecdotal observation).
If I have time at the end of this season, I’ll try to map out this evaluation concept for each player.
