With the holidays approaching, we’ll be taking next week off from the Weekly newsletter. However, we will still be sending out The Starting Five newsletter this week to Hoop Vision PLUS subscribers.
If you’d like to begin receiving The Starting Five along with other subscriber-only coverage and exclusive discounts to Hoop Vision merch and digital products, please subscribe to Hoop Vision PLUS. In last week’s edition, we broke down the Alabama-Houston and Baylor-Villanova results.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a holiday gift for your hoop-obsessed family, friends or colleagues, and don’t want to worry about supply chain issues and product shortages…get them a gift subscription to Hoop Vision PLUS. (Head Coaches: it’s the perfect gift for your staff!)
In today’s edition, we take a deep dive into the data on all things floaters. Why Villanova doesn’t take floaters, other teams with similar shot outputs, and some final thoughts on the floater as a whole.
Villanova’s Lack of Floaters
In Monday’s edition of The Starting Five, I wrote about the interesting dynamics between Villanova’s offense and Baylor’s defense during last weekend’s game.
Here’s an excerpt from that newsletter:
Jay Wright and Villanova have become famous for playing off of two feet when driving to the basket. Seriously… coachesareobsessedwithit.
On the other hand, Baylor’s no-middle defense is all about forcing the ball handler to the baseline side and aggressively sending early help.
The result of those two styles?
A whole lot of this…
For the majority of the game, Villanova was unwilling to force the issue in the paint when driving at Baylor defenders. Instead, they relied on the jump stop into a pivot to then kick the ball out to potential shooters.
Upon further reflection, I realized that there is a statistical category that can serve as a proxy to this dynamic: Floater attempts.
Synergy Sports tracks every floater taken in half-court offense — and I actually wrote about how the Baylor defensive scheme forces opponents into a high volume of floaters back in February of 2020.
Villanova’s offense, however, is an even bigger outlier. So far this season, they have recorded just three floater attempts. To be even more precise, just 1.7% of Villanova’s two-point attempts have been floaters. That’s by far the lowest floater rate in the country.
In the graph below, the x-axis is floater rate. The y-axis is two-point percentage on all two-pointers taken in the half-court — not just floaters. The data is from this season only.
On average, 9.7% of two-point attempts have been floaters this season.
27 teams are allocating less than 5% of their two-point attempts to floaters. Those teams are shooting 51.3% on all two-point shots in the half-court.
24 teams are allocating more than 15% of their two-point attempts to floaters. Those teams are shooting 46.2% on all two-point shots in the half-court.
Villanova is all the way to the left on the graph — meaning they take the fewest floaters of any offense in the country. As it stands right now, Nova is in a battle for the lowest floater rate since Synergy began tracking in 2010. Sam Houston State (2010) has the lowest over the course of a season at 1.6%.
Surprisingly, Villanova has struggled with two-point efficiency in November and December. The Wildcats currently rank 238th in two-point percentage. They have finished in the top 100 in that category for eight straight seasons prior to this one.
Historical Floater Data
To further examine floater tendencies, I went back through the 13 seasons of floater data and grouped by team.
The graph below is exactly the same as the one from the previous section, but now the data includes all seasons since 2010.
Villanova’s start to the 2021-22 season is no fluke: The Wildcats historically do not take floaters. Wisconsin, Bucknell, West Virginia, and Harvard round out the bottom five programs in floater rate since 2010.
Belmont stands out on the chart as the most efficient two-point shooting program of the past 13 seasons. On episode #38 of Solving Basketball, it was mentioned by Paul Mills that former Belmont head coach Rick Byrd did not let his players shoot floaters. Byrd’s teams finished number one in the country in two-point percentage in five out of his last seven seasons.
Volume floater teams with elite two-point FG%
Belmont and Villanova are the most notable programs that have produced elite two-point offenses by (more or less) outlawing the floater. However, there are some examples of elite two-point offenses that embraced the floater.
From 2018 to 2020, Dayton finished ranked either one or two in two-point percentage in all three seasons. In those seasons, the Flyers were dependent on floaters.
The other two programs to produce similar results to Dayton over multiple seasons were Gonzaga and Liberty. The Zags were especially floater-dependent in 2015 and 2020.
To float or not to float?
As we saw in the earlier graphs, teams that don’t rely on floaters tend to shoot a higher two-point percentage than teams that do rely on floater.
It’s not exactly a mystery as to why: The national average shooting percentage on floater attempts this season is just 36%. Over the entire 13-year sample, the average is 35%.
So in a vacuum, there is certainly some preliminary evidence in support of avoiding floaters.
But, just like the mid-range debate, context matters. Who is taking the floater? How much time is on the shot clock? What coverage is the defense in? All of that matters.
In fact, I’d argue that context matters even more for floaters than for mid-range.
Generally speaking, mid-range shooting ability tends to be highly correlated with three-point shooting ability — especially among guards. As a result, it’s (relatively) easy to instruct (or create more opportunities schematically for) that guard to get behind the three-point. If the player is good at both shot types, they might as well take the extra point and shoot more threes.
On the other hand, floaters — again, generally speaking — are more likely to be replaced by shots at the rim. Anecdotally, I think that floater shooting ability and rim shooting ability are less correlated.
Let’s use one of the best floater shooters of the past decade as an example: Jordan Ford from Saint Mary’s.
During Ford’s senior season, he led the country in floater attempts per game. Additionally, he was extremely efficient on his floaters — shooting over 51%. At just 6-foot-1 and 175 pounds, taking the extra dribble, drawing contact, and getting to the rim just wasn’t Ford’s game. Especially given how efficient he was on floaters.
All that being said, there are two reasons worth noting as to why national shooting percentages are so low on floaters:
A lot of players are simply inefficient on floaters. (Jordan Ford was more of the exception than the rule)
Floaters can often be the result of the offense not getting what they actually wanted in the first place. A Jordan Ford or Trae Young type of player might come off of a ball screen seeking a floater. But often times a floater is more of a measure of last resort. The roller wasn’t open, the shake three was covered, so now the offense is left with a tough floater in the paint.
