How important is the mid-range jumper in 2024?
Revisiting an old question by looking at the remaining Sweet 16 teams.
And then there were 16.
After a great four days of basketball, we have a fairly chalky Sweet 16 — with every one-seed and two-seed advancing to the second weekend.
Back before the season started, I wrote a newsletter titled How important is the mid-range jumper in 2023?
The findings were nuanced.
Yes, mid-range shot attempts are generally inefficient. This season, the average mid-range attempt was worth just 0.76 points per shot.
However, the best defenses tend to force opponents into taking mid-range shots. Which leads me to one of my main takeaways from that old newsletter:
But generally speaking, having diversity in your offense is a good thing. Especially against defenses capable of taking away your strengths. A team that can score in several different ways is significantly more resilient against strong opposing defenses.
In other words, the mid-range can sometimes be a necessary tool to have in your toolkit against elite defenses.
In fact, I found that 2023 UConn relied more on the mid-range as they got deeper into last year’s tournament — especially in the championship game against San Diego State.
In today’s newsletter, we’ll take a look at the mid-range volume of the 16 remaining teams. And how much they’ve relied on those shots in the first two rounds of the tournament.