Strategy Items in Basketball

1) Frequently in basketball, you hear announcers talk about a team holding the ball for the last shot when, for example, the game is tied and they have the ball. If you are not forced by the shot clock to shoot before the end of the game, this is clearly the right move, since you will not give your opponents’ the chance for a tying shot should you score. However, I’ve never heard anybody talk about the correct strategy with just a little more time left on the clock.

Let’s suppose the following situation. There is about 1:05 left on the clock (the shot clock is 35 seconds). You have the ball and you are somewhere between 3 points down and tied. What should you do? I contend that the correct strategy is to try to get a good shot off in about 15 seconds. Even if you really can’t get anything, it still may be better to take two mediocre shots than one good shot. Even good shots miss. These situations recur frequently, and you rarely see a team hurrying in this situation to score, but they should. You have the ability to control how many possessions there are in the game. You want there to be 3, since you will get two of them, and will have two scoring chances instead of one (all this assumes there won’t be any turnovers, or anything else funny, which there won’t be on routine possessions). If you score too quickly, then they can (and should) run down and score quickly, and make it into a 4-possession game, giving them the last shot. If you wait too long, then they will get to hold the ball for a last shot, allowing them to take the lead or tie with no chance for you to reply. There is significant value to having the last possession in any timed sport where the score is within the amount you can score in that one possession, and teams should be more conscious of working to secure it.

2) Over the short term, there is a lot of luck in basketball. When a good shooter attempts a 3-pointer, he expects it to go in somewhere around 40-50% of the time. Significantly more or less, depending on whether or not he’s guarded well (it’s probably 70%ish if he can take as much time as he likes). But the average is all we really care about. If this shooter takes 7 3-pointers per game, he will make about 3 of them over the long run, but over the short term it could vary reasonably between 0 and 6, which is an 18-point swing based on pure chance. If he shoots 1-7, it doesn’t necessarily mean he screwed up – he might have taken poor shots, or he might have just gotten unlucky. Even the best shooters in the world have bad days. The more shots a player (or a team) takes, the greater the chance that they will shoot at their average. All of this is basic statistics.

The reason I’ve been pedantic about pointing this out, is that it points to the obvious strategy for underdog teams in the NCAA tournament that you rarely see discussed or employed. They should attempt to shorten the game – decrease the number of possessions by playing slowly and taking up as much of the shot clock as they reasonably can. That this will help is obvious if you think about it. Suppose that they played a game of infinite length. The better team would win 100% of the time - that’s what being the better team means. As you lessen the length of the game, the chance that the weaker team wins increases. If they could, the weaker team should agree to play a game with only one possession each. This would maximize their chance of winning – in reality their chance still may be negligible, but we’re only concerned with maximizing it.

3) Teams frequently screw up what they should be doing with a big lead – particularly when they are the underdog. You frequently hear announcers criticize a team for changing their tactics when they are ahead big. To some extent this makes sense – if what you’re doing is working you should generally avoid changing it. What they miss is that your strategy should depend on how you got your big lead. If you gain a big lead because you’ve hit 8-10 on your 3-pointers, then you should absolutely slow the game down. Planning to continue hitting 3-pointers at an 80% clip is a stupid strategy – nobody can shoot that well for an extended period of time. You’ve gotten lucky, and you should slow the game down and try to maximize the value of that good luck. If you’ve been outplaying them – getting quick easy shots and fast breaks and such, then I would say you should generally continue to outplay them. You should never give up an easy basket just to take time off of the clock before the last bit of the game (or with a very, very big lead). However, you should still reel it in a little – there’s no reason to be driving into the lane and forcing a shot early in the possession, which you see all the time from teams that are ahead big.

Clearly, though, if you’re up by 25 and there’s 6 minutes left on the clock, you should not be doing anything except dribbling the ball for 35 seconds and occasionally shooting if you get an obvious shot. If you just take up your 35 seconds, then even if they sprint down the floor and make a 3-pointer at every opportunity (taking, say, about 5 seconds each), they will only score 24 points in the rest of the game. This is certainly the correct strategy if you are up 20, too. As the amount you’re up by decreases, you should focus more and more on scoring and getting high percentage shots, and less on using the clock. When you’re up fewer points than the number of minutes left, you should be just playing normally.