Measuring Spatial Allocative Efficiency in Basketball

Nathan Sandholtz, Jacob Mortensen, and Luke Bornn

Simon Fraser University

August 4, 2020
arXiv:1912.05129v2 [stat.AP] 1 Aug 2020

Abstract
Every shot in basketball has an opportunity cost; one player’s shot eliminates all potential
opportunities from their teammates for that play. For this reason, player-shot efficiency should
ultimately be considered relative to the lineup. This aspect of efficiency—the optimal way
to allocate shots within a lineup—is the focus of our paper. Allocative efficiency should be
considered in a spatial context since the distribution of shot attempts within a lineup is highly
dependent on court location. We propose a new metric for spatial allocative efficiency by
comparing a player’s field goal percentage (FG%) to their field goal attempt (FGA) rate in
context of both their four teammates on the court and the spatial distribution of their shots.
Leveraging publicly available data provided by the National Basketball Association (NBA), we
estimate player FG% at every location in the offensive half court using a Bayesian hierarchical
model. Then, by ordering a lineup’s estimated FG%s and pairing these rankings with the
lineup’s empirical FGA rate rankings, we detect areas where the lineup exhibits inefficient shot
allocation. Lastly, we analyze the impact that sub-optimal shot allocation has on a team’s
overall offensive potential, demonstrating that inefficient shot allocation correlates with reduced
scoring.

Keywords: Bayesian hierarchical model, spatial data, ranking, ordering, basketball

*The first and second authors contributed equally to this work.

1 Introduction
From 2017 to 2019, the Oklahoma City Thunder faced four elimination games across three playoff
series. In each of these games, Russell Westbrook attempted over 30 shots and had an average
usage rate of 45.5%.1 The game in which Westbrook took the most shots came in the first round of
the 2017-18 National Basketball Association (NBA) playoffs, where he scored 46 points on 43 shot
attempts in a 96-91 loss to the Utah Jazz. At the time, many popular media figures conjectured
that having one player dominate field goal attempts in this way would limit the Thunder’s success.
While scoring 46 points in a playoff basketball game is an impressive feat for any one player, its
impact on the overall game score is moderated by the fact that it required 43 attempts. Perhaps
1
Usage percentage is an estimate of the percentage of team plays used by a player while they were on the floor. For a
detailed formula see www.basketball-reference.com/about/glossary.html

1
not coincidentally, the Thunder lost three of these four close-out games and never managed to make
it out of the first round of the playoffs.
At its core, this critique is about shot efficiency. The term ‘shot efficiency’ is used in various
contexts within the basketball analytics community, but in most cases it has some reference to the
average number of points a team or player scores per shot attempt. Modern discussion around shot
efficiency in the NBA typically focuses on either shot selection or individual player efficiency. The
concept of shot selection efficiency is simple: 3-pointers and shots near the rim have the highest
expected points per shot, so teams should prioritize these high-value shots. The idea underlying
individual player efficiency is also straightforward; scoring more points on the same number of shot
attempts increases a team’s overall offensive potential.
However, when discussing a player’s individual efficiency it is critical to do so in context of
the lineup. Basketball is not a 1-v-1 game, but a 5-v-5 game. Therefore, when a player takes a
shot, the opportunity cost not only includes all other shots this player could have taken later in the
possession, but also the potential shots of their four teammates. So regardless of a player’s shooting
statistics relative to the league at large, a certain dimension of shot efficiency can only be defined
relative to the abilities of a player’s teammates. Applying this to the Oklahoma City Thunder
example above, if Westbrook were surrounded by dismal shooters, 43 shot attempts might not only
be defensible but also desirable. On the other hand, if his inordinate number of attempts prevented
highly efficient shot opportunities from his teammates, then he caused shots to be inefficiently
distributed and decreased his team’s scoring potential. This aspect of efficiency—the optimal way
to allocate shots within a lineup—is the primary focus of our paper.
Allocative efficiency is spatially dependent. As illustrated in Figure 1, the distribution of shots
within a lineup is highly dependent on court location. The left plot in Figure 1 shows the overall
relationship between shooting frequency (x-axis) and shooting skill (y-axis), while the four plots on
the right show the same relationship conditioned on various court regions. Each dot represents a
player, and the size of the dot is proportional to the number of shots the player took over the 2016-
17 NBA regular season. To emphasize how shot allocation within lineups is spatially dependent, we
have highlighted the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup, consisting of LeBron James, Kevin Love,
Kyrie Irving, JR Smith, and Tristan Thompson.

2
 Overall Field Goal Attempt (FGA) Rate by Points Per Shot (PPS) Restricted Area: FGA Rate by PPS 3−pointers: FGA Rate by PPS
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Field Goal Attempt Rate (per 36 minutes) Field Goal Attempt Rate (per 36 minutes) Field Goal Attempt Rate (per 36 minutes)

Figure 1: Left: overall relationship between field goal attempt rate (x-axis) and points per shot (y-axis).
Right: same relationship conditioned on various court regions. The Cleveland Cavaliers 2016-17 starting
lineup is highlighted in each plot. The weighted least squares fit of each scatter plot is overlaid in each plot
by a dotted line.

When viewing field goal attempts without respect to court location (left plot), Kyrie Irving
appears to shoot more frequently than both Tristan Thompson and LeBron James, despite scoring
fewer points per shot than either of them. However, after conditioning on court region (right plots),
we see that Irving only has the highest FGA rate in the mid-range region, which is the region for
which he has the highest PPS for this lineup. James takes the most shots in the restricted area and
paint regions—regions in which he is the most efficient scorer. Furthermore, we see that Thompson’s
high overall PPS is driven primarily by his scoring efficiency from the restricted area and that he
has few shot attempts outside this area. Clearly, understanding how to efficiently distribute shots
within a lineup must be contextualized by spatial information.
Notice that in the left panel of Figure 1, the relationship between field goal attempt (FGA)
rate and points per shot (PPS) appears to be slightly negative, if there exists a relationship at all.
Once the relationship between FGA rate and PPS is spatially disaggregated (see right hand plots
of Figure 1), the previously negative relationship between these variables becomes positive in every
region. This instance of Simpson’s paradox has non-trivial implications in the context of allocative
efficiency which we will discuss in the following section.
The goal of our project is to create a framework to assess the strength of the relationship between
shooting frequency and shooting skill spatially within lineups and to quantify the consequential
impact on offensive production. Using novel metrics we develop, we quantify how many points are
being lost through inefficient spatial lineup shot allocation, visualize where they are being lost, and
identify which players are responsible.

3
1.1 Related Work
In recent years, a number of metrics have been developed which aim to measure shot efficiency, such
as true shooting percentage (Kubatko et al. 2007), qSQ, and qSI (Chang et al. 2014). Additionally,
metrics have been developed to quantify individual player efficiency, such as Hollinger’s player
efficiency rating (Sports Reference LLC n.d.). While these metrics intrinsically account for team
context, there have been relatively few studies which have looked at shooting decisions explicitly
in context of lineup, and none spatially.
Goldman & Rao (2011) coined the term ‘allocative efficiency’, modeling the decision to shoot
as a dynamic mixed-strategy equilibrium weighing both the continuation value of a possession and
the value of a teammate’s potential shot. They propose that a team achieves optimal allocative
efficiency when, at any given time, the lineup cannot reallocate the ball to increase productivity on
the margin. Essentially, they argue that lineups optimize over all dimensions of an offensive strategy
to achieve equal marginal efficiency for every shot. The left plot of Figure 1 is harmonious with this
theory—there appears to be no relationship between player shooting frequency and player shooting
skill when viewed on the aggregate. However, one of the most important dimensions the players
optimize over is court location. Once we disaggregate the data by court location, (as shown in the
right plots of Figure 1), we see a clear relationship between shooting frequency and shooting skill.
A unique contribution of our work is a framework to assess this spatial component of allocative
efficiency.
Shot satisfaction (Cervone et al. 2016) is another rare example of a shot efficiency metric that
considers lineups. Shot satisfaction is defined as the expected value of a possession conditional on
a shot attempt (accounting for various contextual features such as the shot location, shooter, and
defensive pressure at the time of the shot) minus the unconditional expected value of the play.
However, since shot satisfaction is marginalized over the allocative and spatial components, these
factors cannot be analyzed using this metric alone. Additionally, shot satisfaction is dependent on
proprietary data which limits its availability to a broad audience.

1.2 Data and Code

The data used for this project is publicly available from the NBA stats API (stats.nba.com). Shooter
information and shot (x, y) locations are available through the shotchartdetail’ API endpoint, while
lineup information can be constructed from the playbyplayv2’ endpoint. Code for constructing
lineup information from play-by-play data is available at: https://github.com/jwmortensen/
pbp2lineup. Using this code, we gathered a set of 224,567 shots taken by 433 players during the
2016-17 NBA regular season, which is the data used in this analysis. Code used to perform an
empirical version of the analysis presented in this paper is also available online: https://github.
com/nsandholtz/lpl.

4
2 Models
The foundation of our proposed allocative efficiency metrics rest on spatial estimates of both player
FG% and field goal attempt (FGA) rates. With some minor adjustments, we implement the FG%
model proposed in Cervone et al. (2016). As this model is the backbone of the metrics we propose
in Section 3, we thoroughly detail the components of their model in Section 2.1. In Section 2.2, we
present our model for estimating spatial FGA rates.

2.1 Estimating FG% Surfaces

Player FG% is a highly irregular latent quantity over the court space. In general, players make
more shots the closer they are to the hoop, but some players are more skilled from a certain side
of the court and others specialize from very specific areas, such as the corner 3-pointer. In order
to capture these kinds of non-linear relationships, Cervone et al. (2016) summarizes the spatial
variation in player shooting skill by a Gaussian process represented by a low-dimensional set of
deterministic basis functions. Player-specific weights are estimated for the basis functions using a
Bayesian hierarchical model (Gelman et al. 2013). This allows the model to capture nuanced spatial
features that player FG% surfaces tend to exhibit, while maintaining a feasible dimensionality for
computation.
We model the logit of πj (s), the probability that player j makes a shot at location s, as a linear
model:
 π (s) 
j
log = β 0 x + Zj (s). (1)
1 − πj (s)

Here β is a 4 × 1 vector of covariate effects and x is a 4 × 1 vector of observed covariates for the
shot containing an intercept, player position, shot distance, and the interaction of player position
and shot distance. Zj (s) is a Gaussian process which accounts for the impact of location on the
probability of player j making a shot and is modeled using a functional basis representation,

Zj (s) = wj0 ΛΨ (s), (2)

where wj = (wj1 , . . . , wjD )0 denotes the latent basis function weights for player j and ΛΨ (s) denotes
the basis functions. Specifically, Λ = (λ λ01 , . . . , λ 0D )0 is a D × K matrix, where each row vector λ d
represents the projection of the dth basis function onto a triangular mesh with K vertices over
the offensive half court (more details on the construction of Λ follow below). We use the mesh
proposed in Cervone et al. (2016), which was selected specifically for modeling offensive spatial
behaviour in basketball. Ψ(s) = (ψ1 (s), . . . , ψK (s))0 is itself a vector of basis functions where each
ψk (s) is 1 at mesh vertex k, 0 at all other vertices, and values at the interior points of each triangle
are determined by linear interpolation between vertices (see Lindgren et al. (2011) for details).
Finally, we assume wj ∼ N (ω ω j , Σ j ), which makes (2) a Gaussian process with mean ω 0j ΛΨ (s) and
covariance function Cov(s1 , s2 ) = Ψ (s1 )0Λ 0Σ j ΛΨ (s2 ).

5
 Following Miller et al. (2014), the bases of shot taking behavior, Λ , are computed through
a combination of smoothing and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) (Lee & Seung 1999).
Using integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) as the engine for our inference, we first fit
a log Gaussian Cox Process (LGCP) (Banerjee et al. 2015) independently to each player’s point
process defined by the (x, y) locations of their made shots using the aforementioned mesh.2 Each
player’s estimated intensity function is evaluated at each vertex, producing a K-dimensional vector
for each of the L = 433 players in our data. These vectors are exponentiated and gathered (by
rows) into the L × K matrix P, which we then factorize via NMF:
  
P≈ B Λ . (3)
L×D D×K

This yields Λ , the deterministic bases we use in (2). While the bases from (3) are constructed
solely with respect to the spatial variation in the FGA data (i.e. no basketball-specific structures
are induced a priori), the constraint on the number of bases significantly impacts the basis shapes.
In general, the NMF tends to first generate bases according to shot distance. After accounting
for this primary source of variation, other systematic features of variation begin to appear in the
bases, notably asymmetry. We use D = 16 basis functions, aligning with Miller et al. (2014) which
suggests the optimal number of basis functions falls between 15 and 20. Collectively, these bases
comprise a comprehensive set of shooting tendencies, as shown in Figure 2. We have added labels
post hoc to provide contextual intuition.
Under Hoop Hoop Right Lower Paint Top of Key Right Baseline Right Corner 3 Right Arc 3 Center Arc 3

Hoop Front Hoop Left Upper Paint Elbow Jumpers Left Baseline Left Corner 3 Left Arc 3 Residual

Figure 2: Deterministic bases resulting from the non-negative matrix factorization of P. The plots are
arranged such that the bases closest to the hoop are on the left (e.g. Under Hoop) and the bases furthest from
the hoop are on the right (e.g. Center Arc 3). The residual basis, comprising court locations where shots are
infrequently attempted from, is shown in the bottom-right plot.

Conceptually, the Zj (s) term in (1) represents a player-specific spatial ‘correction’ to the global
regression model β 0 x. These player-specific surfaces are linear combinations of the bases shown in
2
Players who took less than five shots in the regular season are treated as “replacement players.”

6
Figure 2. The weights of these combinations, wj , are latent parameters which are jointly estimated
with β . Since these player weights can be highly sensitive for players with very little data, it
is imperative to introduce a regularization mechanism on them, which is accomplished using a
conditionally autoregressive (CAR) prior. Conveniently, the NMF in (3) provides player-specific
loadings onto these bases, B, which we use in constructing this CAR prior on the basis weights,
wj (Besag 1974). The purpose of using a CAR prior on the basis weights is to shrink the FG%
estimates of players with similar shooting characteristics toward each other. This is integral for
obtaining realistic FG% estimates in areas where a player took a low volume of shots. With only
a handful of shots from an area, a player’s empirical FG% can often be extreme (e.g. near 0% or
100%). The CAR prior helps to regularize these extremes by borrowing strength from the player’s
neighbors in the estimation.
In order to get some notion of shooting similarity between players, we calculate the Euclidean
distance between the player loadings contained in B and, for a given player, define the five players
with the closest player loadings as their neighbors. This is intentionally chosen to be fewer than the
number of neighbors selected by Cervone, recognizing that more neighbors defines a stronger prior
and limits player-to-player variation in the FG% surfaces. We enforce symmetry in the nearest-
neighbors relationship by assuming that if player j is a neighbor of player `, then player ` is also
a neighbor of player j, which results in some players having more than five neighbors. These
relationships are encoded in a player adjacency matrix H where entry (j, `) is 1 if player ` is a
neighbor of player j and 0 otherwise. The CAR prior on wj can be specified as
!
2 1 X τ2
(wj |w−(j) , τ ) ∼ N w` , ID (4)
nj nj
`:Hj` =1

τ 2 ∼ InvGam(1, 1).

where nj is the total number of neighbors for player j.

Lastly, we set a N (0, 0.001 × I) prior on β , and fit the model using INLA. This yields a model
that varies spatially and allows us to predict player-specific FG% at any location in the offensive
half court. In order to get high resolution FG% estimates, we partition the court into 1 ft. by 1 ft.
grid cells (yielding a total of M = 2350 cells) and denote player j’s FG% at the centroid of grid cell
i as ξij . The projection of the FG% posterior mean (ξbj ) for LeBron James is depicted in Figure 3.
In order to have sufficient data to reliably estimate these surfaces, we assume that player FG%s
are lineup independent. We recognize this assumption may be violated in some cases, as players who
draw significant defensive attention can improve the FG%s of their teammates by providing them
with more unguarded shot opportunities. Additionally, without defensive information about the
shot opportunities, the FG% estimates are subject to systematic bias. Selection bias is introduced
by unequal amounts of defensive pressure applied to shooters of different skill levels.
The Bayesian modeling framework can amplify selection bias as well. Since the FG% estimates
are regularized in our model via a CAR prior, players FG% estimates shrink toward their neighbors
(which we’ve defined in terms of FGA rate). While this feature stabilizes estimates for players with

7
low sample sizes, it can be problematic when entire neighborhoods have low sample sizes from
specific regions. For example, there are many centers who rarely or never shoot from long range.
Consequently, the entire neighborhood shrinks toward the global mean 3-point FG%, inaccurately
inflating these players’ FG%s beyond the 3-point line. These are intriguing challenges and represent
promising directions for future work.

LeBron James' Estimated FG% LeBron James' FG% Standard Deviation

FG% Std. Dev.

80 7
70 6
60 5
50
40 4
30

Figure 3: LeBron James 2016-17 FG% posterior mean (left) and posterior standard deviation (right) projected
onto the offensive half court. The prediction surfaces shown here and throughout the figures in this paper
utilize projections onto a spatial grid of 1 ft. by 1 ft. cells.

2.2 Determining FGA Rate Surfaces

We determine a player’s FGA rate surface by smoothing their shot attempts via a LGCP. This
model has the form
log λ(s) = β0 + Z(s),

where λ(s) is the Poisson intensity indicating the number of expected shots at location s, β0 is an
intercept, and Z(s) is a Gaussian process. We fit this model separately for each player using INLA,
following the approach in Simpson et al. (2015). In brief, they demonstrate that the likelihood for
the LGCP can be approximated using a finite-dimensional Gaussian random field, allowing Z(s)
to be represented by the basis function expansion Z(s) = B
P
b=1 zb φb (s). The basis function φb (s)
projects shot location onto a triangular mesh akin to the one detailed for (2). The expected value
of λ(s) integrated over the court is equal to the number of shots a player has taken, however there
can be small discrepancies between the fitted intensity function and the observed number of shots.
In order to ensure consistency, we scale the resulting intensity function to exactly yield the player’s
observed number of shot attempts in that lineup.
We normalize the surfaces to FGA per 36 minutes by dividing by the total number of minutes
played by the associated lineup and multiplying by 36, allowing us to make meaningful comparisons
between lineups who differ in the amount of minutes played. As with the FG% surfaces (ξξ ), we
partition the court into 1 ft. by 1 ft. grid cells and denote player j’s FGA rate at the centroid of
grid cell i as Aij .
Note that we approach the FGA rate estimation from a fundamentally different perspective than

8
 the FG% estimation. We view a player’s decision to shoot the ball as being completely within their
control and hence non-random. As such, we incorporate no uncertainty in the estimated surfaces.
We use the LGCP as a smoother for observed shots rather than as an estimate of a player’s true
latent FGA rate. Other smoothing methods (e.g. kernel based methods (Diggle 1985)) could be
used instead.
Depending on the player and lineup, a player’s shot attempt profile can vary drastically from
lineup to lineup. Figure 4 shows Kyrie Irving’s estimated FGA rate surfaces in the starting lineup
(left) and the lineup in which he played the most minutes without LeBron James (middle). Based
on these two lineups, Irving took 9.2 more shots per 36 minutes when he didn’t share the court
with James. He also favored the left side of the court far more, which James tends to dominate
when on the court.
Kyrie Irving FGA rate Kyrie Irving FGA rate
Most minute Lineup w/ LeBron Most minute Lineup w/o LeBron Difference

FGA FGA Diff

0.050
0.10 0.06
0.025
0.04
0.05 0.000
0.02
−0.025

Figure 4: Left: Kyrie Irving’s FGA rate per 36 minutes in the starting lineup (in which he shared the most
minutes with LeBron James). Center: Kyrie Irving’s FGA rate per 36 minutes in the lineup for which he
played the most minutes without LeBron James. Right: The difference of the center surface from the left
surface.

Clearly player shot attempt rates are not invariant to their teammates on the court. We
therefore restrict player FGA rate estimation to lineup-specific data. Fortunately, the additional
sparsity introduced by conditioning on lineup is a non-issue. If a player has no observed shot
attempts from a certain region (e.g, Tristan Thompson from 3-point range), this simply means
they chose not to shoot from that region—we don’t need to borrow strength from neighboring
players to shed light on this area of “incomplete data”.

3 Allocative Efficiency Metrics

The models for FG% and FGA rate described in Section 2 are the backbone of the allocative effi-
ciency metrics we introduce in this section: lineup points lost (LPL) and player LPL contribution
(PLC). Before getting into the details, we emphasize that these metrics are agnostic to the underly-
ing FG% and FGA models; they can be implemented using even crude estimates of FG% and FGA
rate, for example, by dividing the court into discrete regions and using the empirical FG% and
FGA rate within each region.3 Also note that the biases affecting FG% and FGA rate described
3
Section 6.1 in the appendix shows how LPL can be calculated using empirical estimates of FG% and FGA rate.
We use the Cavaliers starting lineup to compare these empirical LPL surfaces to the more sophisticated versions
presented in the main text.

9
 in Section 2 may affect the allocative efficiency metrics as well. Section 4 includes a discussion of
the causal limitations of the approach.
LPL is the output of a two-step process. First, we redistribute a lineup’s observed distribution
of shot attempts according to a proposed optimum. This optimum is based on ranking the five
players in the lineup with respect to their FG% and FGA rate and then redistributing the shot
attempts such that the FG% ranks and FGA rate ranks match. Second, we estimate how many
points could have been gained had a lineup’s collection of shot attempts been allocated according
to this alternate distribution. In this section, we go over each of these steps in detail and conclude
by describing PLC, which measures how individual players contribute to LPL.

3.1 Spatial Rankings Within a Lineup

With models for player FG% and player-lineup FGA rate, we can rank the players in a given lineup
(from 1 to 5) on these metrics at any spot on the court. For a given lineup, let R ξi be a discrete
transformation of ξ i —the lineup’s FG% vector in court cell i—yielding each player’s FG% rank
relative to their four teammates. Formally,

ξ (k)
Rij = {(nξi + 1) − k : ξij ≡ ξi }, (5)

where nξi is the length of ξ i , the vector being ranked (this length will always be 5 in our case),
(k)
and ξi is the kth order statistic of ξ i . Since ξij is a stochastic quantity governed by a posterior
ξ
distribution, Rij is also distributional, however its distribution is discrete, the support being the
ξ
integers {1, 2, 3, 4, 5}. The distribution of Rij can be approximated by taking posterior samples of
ξ i and ranking them via (5). Figure 16 in the appendix shows the 20% quantiles, medians, and
80% quantiles of the resulting transformed variates for the Cavaliers starting lineup.
We obtain ranks for FGA rates in the same manner as for FG%, except these will instead be
deterministic quantities since the FGA rate surfaces, A , are fixed. We define Rij A as

A (k)
Rij = {(nAi + 1) − k : Aij ≡ Ai }, (6)

(k)
where nAi is the length of A i and Ai is the kth order statistic of A i . Figure 5 shows the estimated
maximum a posteriori4 (MAP) FG% rank surfaces, R b ξ , and the deterministic FGA rate rank
surfaces, R A , for the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup.
4
For the FG% rank surfaces we use the MAP estimate in order to ensure the estimates are always in the support of
bξ ∈ {1, . . . , 5}). For parameters with continuous support, such as ξb, the hat
the transformation (i.e. to ensure Rij
symbol denotes the posterior mean.

10
 LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson

FGA rate
per 36
LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson 0.4
0.3
0.2
FG% MAP Rank
0.1
1
2
3
4
5

LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson

FGA rate Rank

1
2
3
4
5

Figure 5: Top: Estimated FG% ranks for the Cleveland Cavaliers’ starting lineup. Bottom: Deterministic
FGA rate ranks.

The strong correspondence between R b ξ and R A shown in Figure 5 is not surprising; all other
factors being equal, teams would naturally want their most skilled shooters taking the most shots
and the worst shooters taking the fewest shots in any given location. By taking the difference of
a lineup’s FG% rank surface from its FGA rate rank surface, R A − R b ξ , we obtain a surface which
measures how closely the lineup’s FG% ranks match their FGA rate ranks. Figure 6 shows these
surfaces for the Cavaliers’ starting lineup.

LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson

Rank
Correspondence
4
3
2
1
0
−1
−2
−3
−4

Figure 6: Rank correspondence surfaces for the Cleveland Cavaliers’ starting lineup.

Note that rank correspondence ranges from -4 to 4. A value of -4 means that the worst shooter
in the lineup took the most shots from that location, while a positive 4 means the best shooter
took the fewest shots from that location. In general, positive values of rank correspondence mark
areas of potential under-usage and negative values show potential over-usage. For the Cavaliers, the
positive values around the 3-point line for Kyrie Irving suggest that he may be under-utilized as a

11
3-point shooter. On the other hand, the negative values for LeBron James in the mid-range region
suggest that he may be over-used in this area. We emphasize, however, that conclusions should
be made carefully. Though inequality between the FG% and FGA ranks may be indicative of sub-
optimal shot allocation, this interpretation may not hold in every situation due to bias introduced
by confounding variables (e.g. defensive pressure, shot clock, etc.).

3.2 Lineup Points Lost

By reducing the FG% and FGA estimates to ranks, we compromise the magnitude of player-to-
player differences within lineups. Here we introduce lineup points lost (LPL), which measures
deviation from perfect rank correspondence while retaining the magnitudes of player-to-player
differences in FG% and FGA.
LPL is defined as the difference in expected points between a lineup’s actual distribution of FG
attempts, A , and a proposed redistribution, A ∗ , constructed to yield perfect rank correspondence
∗
(i.e. R A − R ξ = 0 ). Formally, we calculate LPL in the ith cell as

5
X

LPLi = vi · ξij · Ai[g(Rξ )] − Aij (7)
ij
j=1
5
X
vi · ξij · A∗ij − Aij ,


= (8)
j=1

where vi is the point value (2 or 3) of a made shot, ξij is the FG% for player j in cell i, Aij is
ξ ξ A }. The function g(·)
player j’s FG attempts (per 36 minutes) in cell i, and g(Rij ) = {k : Rij ≡ Rik
reallocates the observed shot attempt vector A i such that the best shooter always takes the most
shots, the second best shooter takes the second most shots, and so forth.
Figure 7 shows a toy example of how LPL is computed for an arbitrary 3-point region, con-
textualized via the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup. In this hypothetical scenario, James takes
the most shots despite both Love and Irving being better shooters from this court region. When
calculating LPL for this region, Irving is allocated James’ nine shots since he is the best shooter in
this area. Love, as the second best shooter, is allocated Irving’s four shots (which was the second
most shots taken across the lineup). James, as the third best shooter, is allocated the third most
shot attempts (which is Love’s three shots). Smith and Thompson’s shot allocations are unchanged
since their actual number of shots harmonizes with the distribution imposed by g(·). Each player’s
actual expected points and optimal expected points are calculated by multiplying their FG% by
the corresponding number of shots and the point-value of the shot (3 points in this case). LPL is
the difference (in expectation) between the optimal points and the actual points, which comes out
to 0.84.

12
 Kyrie Irving Kevin Love LeBron James JR Smith Tristan Thompson

FG%: 40% 38% 35% 32% 25%

Actual shots taken: 4 4

3 10
9 1
2 2
1

Optimal redistribution: 9 4 3 2 1

Actual points: ((.40 × 4) + (.38 × 3)

+ (.35 × 9) + (.32 × 2) + (.25 × 1)) × 3 = 20.34

Optimal points: ((.40 × 9) + (.38 × 4) + (.35 × 3) + (.32 × 2) + (.25 × 1)) × 3 = 21.18

Lineup points lost (LPL): Optimal points − Actual points = 0.84

Figure 7: A toy LPL computation in an arbitrary 3-point court region for the Cleveland Cavalier’s starting
lineup. The players are ordered from left to right according to FG% (best to worst). Below each player’s
picture is the number of actual shots the player took from this location. The black arrows show how the
function g(·) reallocates these shots according to the players’ FG% ranks. The filled gray dots show the
number of shots the player would be allocated according to the proposed optimum. Below the horizontal black
line, each player’s actual expected points and optimal expected points are calculated by multiplying their FG%
by the corresponding number of shots and the point value of the shot. LPL is the difference (in expectation)
between the optimal points and the actual points.

The left plot of Figure 8 shows LPL

d (per 36 minutes) over the offensive half court for Cleveland’s
starting lineup, computed using the posterior mean of ξ .5 Notice that the LPL values are highest
around the rim and along the 3-point line. These regions tend to dominate LPL values because the
density of shot attempts is highest in these areas.

Cleveland 2016−17 Starting Lineup Cleveland 2016−17 Starting Lineup

L. James J. Smith K. Love K. Irving T. Thompson L. James J. Smith K. Love K. Irving T. Thompson

LPL per 36 LPL per Shot

0.006
0.06
0.004 0.04
0.002 0.02
0.000 0.00

Shot
Figure 8: LPL
d and LPL
d surfaces for the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup.

If we re-normalize LPL with respect to the number of shots taken in each court cell we can
5
Since
P LPLi is a function of ξ i , which is latent, the uncertainty in LPLi is proportional to the posterior distribution
of 5j=1 ξij . Figures 17-18 in the appendix illustrate the distributional nature of LPL.

13
identify areas of inefficiency that do not stand out due to low densities of shot attempts:

LPLi
LPLShot
i = P5 . (9)
j=1 Aij

This formulation yields the average lineup points lost per shot from region i, as shown in the right
plot of Figure 8.
LPL incorporates an intentional constraint—for any court cell i, A ∗i is constrained to be a
permutation of A i . This ensures that no single player can be reallocated every shot that was taken
by the lineup (unless a single player took all of the shots from that region to begin with). It also
ensures that the total number of shots in the redistribution will always equal the observed number
of shots from that location i.e. 5j=1 Aij = 5j=1 A∗ij , for all i .
P P

Ultimately, LPL aims to quantify the points that could have been gained had a lineup adhered
to the shot allocation strategy defined by A ∗ . However, as will be detailed in Section 4, there
is not a 1-to-1 relationship between ‘lineup points’ as defined here, and actual points. In other
words, reducing the total LPL of a team’s lineup by 1 doesn’t necessarily correspond to a 1-point
gain in their actual score. In fact, we find that a 1-point reduction in LPL corresponds to a
0.6-point gain (on average) in a team’s actual score. One reason for this discrepancy could be
because LPL is influenced by contextual variables that we are unable to account for in our FG%
model, such as the shot clock and defensive pressure. Another may be due to a tacit assumption
in our definition of LPL. By holding each player’s FG% constant despite changing their volume of
shots when redistributing the vector of FG attempts, we implicitly assume that a player’s FG%
is independent of their FGA rate. The basketball analytics community generally agrees that this
assumption does not hold—that the more shots a player is allocated, the less efficient their shots
become. This concept, referred to as the ‘usage-curve’ or ‘skill-curve’, was introduced in Oliver
(2004) and has been further examined in Goldman & Rao (2011). Incorporating usage curves into
LPL could be a promising area of future work.

3.3 Player LPL Contribution

LPL summarizes information from all players in a lineup into a single surface, compromising our
ability to identify how each individual player contributes to LPL. Fortunately, we can parse out
each player’s contribution to LPL and distinguish between points lost due to undershooting and
points lost due to overshooting. We define player j’s LPL contribution (PLC) in court location i
as
!
A∗ij − Aij
PLCij = LPLi × P5 ∗
, (10)
j=1 |Aij − Aij |

where all terms are as defined in the previous section. The parenthetical term in (10) apportions
LPLi among the 5 players in the lineup proportional to the size of their individual contributions to
LPLi . Players who are reallocated more shots under A ∗i compared to their observed number of shot

14
attempts will have PLCij > 0. Therefore, positive PLC values indicate potential undershooting
and negative values indicate potential overshooting. As in the case of LPL, if we divide PLC by
the sum of shot attempts in cell i, we obtain average PLC per shot from location i:

PLCi
PLCShot
i = P5 . (11)
j=1 Aij

The PLCShoti surfaces for the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 2016-17 starting lineup are shown in Figure
9. We see that Kyrie Irving is potentially being under-utilized from beyond the arc and that
LeBron James is potentially over-shooting from the top of the key, which is harmonious with our
observations from Figure 6. However, it is worth noting that the LPL per 36 plot (left plot in
Figure 8) shows very low LPL values from the mid-range region since the Cavaliers have a very low
density of shots from this area. So while it may be true that LeBron tends to overshoot from the
top of the key relative to his teammates, the lineup shoots so infrequently from this area that the
inefficiency is negligible.

LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson

PLC per shot

0.02

0.00

−0.02

Shot
Figure 9: PLC
d surfaces for the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup.

For every red region in Figure 9 (undershooting) there are corresponding blue regions (over-
shooting) among the other players. This highlights the fact that LPL is made up of balancing player
contributions from undershooting and overshooting; for every player who overshoots, another player
(or combination of players) undershoots. By nature of how LPL is constructed, there cannot be
any areas where the entire lineup overshoots or undershoots. For this reason, our method does not
shed light on shot selection. LPL and PLC say nothing about whether shots from a given region
are efficient or not, instead they measure how efficiently a lineup adheres to optimal allocative
efficiency given the shot attempts from that region.

4 Optimality - Discussion and Implications

We have now defined LPL and given the theoretical interpretation (i.e. overuse and underuse), but
we have not yet established that this interpretation is valid in practice. The utility of LPL as a
diagnostic tool hinges on the answers to four questions, which we explore in detail in this section:

15
 1. Do lineups minimize LPL?
2. Does LPL relate to offensive production?
3. How can LPL inform strategy?
4. Is minimizing LPL always optimal?

4.1 Do lineups minimize LPL?

In Figure 8, cell values range from 0 to 0.008, and the sum over all locations in the half court is
0.68. While this suggests that the Cavaliers’ starters were minimizing LPL, we need a frame of
reference to make this claim with certainty. The frame of reference we will use for comparison is the
distribution of LPL under completely random shot allocation. This is not to suggest offenses select
shooting strategies randomly. Rather, a primary reason why lineups fail to effectively minimize LPL
is because the defense has the opposite goal; defenses want to get the opposing lineup to take shots
from places they are bad at shooting from. In other words, while the offense is trying to minimize
LPL, the defense is trying to maximize LPL. By comparing LPL against random allocation, this
provides a general test for whether offenses are able to pull closer to the minimum than defenses
are able to pull toward the maximum, or the absolute worst allocation possible.
In statistical terms, this comparison can be stated as a hypothesis test. We are interested in
testing the null hypothesis that offenses minimize and defenses maximize LPL with equal magni-
tudes. We consider a one-sided alternative—that the offensive minimization outweighs the defensive
response (as measured on by LPL). A permutation test allows us to test these hypotheses by com-
paring a lineup’s observed total LPL (summing over all court locations, M
P
i LPLi , where M is the
total number of 1 ft. by 1 ft. cells in the half court) against the total LPL we would expect under
completely random shot allocation. To ensure the uncertainty in ξ is accounted for, we simulate
variates of the test statistic T as
M M
gH 0
X X
T = LPLi=1 − LPL (12)
gi
i=1 i=1
M X
5 M X
5
! !
A†ij
X X
A∗ij A∗ij



= vi · ξeij · − − vi · ξeij · − Aij (13)
i=1 j=1 i=1 j=1
M X
5
vi · ξeij · Aij − A†ij ,
X

= (14)
i=1 j=1

where ξeij is a sample from player j’s posterior distribution of FG% in cell i, A†ij is the jth element of
a random permutation of the observed FGA rate vector A i , and all other symbols are defined as in
(7)-(8). Note that a different random permutation is drawn for each court cell i. After simulating
500 variates from the null distribution, we approximate the one-sided p-value of the test as the
proportion of variates that are less than 0.
Figure 10 illustrates this test for the Cleveland Cavaliers’ starting lineup. The gray bars show
a histogram of the variates from (12). Bars to the left of the dashed line at 0 represent variates

16
for which random allocation outperforms the observed allocation. The approximate p-value of the
test in this case is 1/500, or 0.002. We can therefore say with high certainty that the Cleveland
starters minimize LPL beyond the defense’s ability to prevent them from doing so.
Permutation test of H0 vs HA

120

100

80
Frequency

60

40
^= 1
p
20 500

−1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
M M
∑ LPLi − ∑ LPLi
0 H
T=
i=1 i=1

Figure 10: Permutation test for the Cleveland Cavaliers’ 2016-17 starting lineup. The gray bars show a
histogram of the variates from (12). The approximate p-value for the Cavaliers starting lineup (i.e. the
proportion of variates that are less than 0) is 1/500 or 0.002.

The computational burden of performing the test precludes performing it for every lineup, but
we did perform the test for each team’s 2016-17 starting lineup. The results are shown in Table
4.1. Across the NBA’s starting lineups, only two teams had no variates less than 0—the Golden
State Warriors and the Portland Trailblazers. The Sacramento Kings showed the worst allocative
efficiency with an approximate p-value of 0.44 for their starting lineup. Based on these results
we are confident that most lineups employ shot allocation strategies that minimize LPL to some
degree, though it appears that some teams do so better than others.

Approximate p-values for H0 vs. HA

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Team GSW POR CLE LAC ATL HOU TOR IND LAL DET DEN NOP CHA UTA OKC
p̂ 0.000 0.000 0.002 0.002 0.014 0.014 0.016 0.020 0.022 0.024 0.028 0.030 0.030 0.038 0.042
16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Team DAL MIA MIN BOS NYK ORL SAS BKN PHI MIL WAS PHX MEM CHI SAC
p̂ 0.044 0.046 0.054 0.056 0.058 0.064 0.104 0.106 0.130 0.134 0.144 0.148 0.170 0.210 0.442

Table 1: Approximate p-values for H0 vs. HA for each team’s starting lineup in the 2016-17 NBA
regular season.

4.2 Does LPL relate to offensive production?

We next want to determine whether teams with lower LPL values tend to be more proficient on
offense. In order to achieve greater discriminatory power, we’ve chosen to make this assessment at

17
 the game level. Specifically, we regress a team’s total game score against their total LPL generated
in that game, accounting for other relevant covariates including the team’s offensive strength, the
opponents’ defensive strength, and home-court advantage. This framework is analogous to the
model proposed in Dixon & Coles (1997).
We calculate game LPL (GLPL) by first dividing the court into three broad court regions
(restricted area, mid-range, and 3-pointers). Then, for a given game and lineup, we calculate
GLPL in each of these court regions (indexed by c) by redistributing the lineup’s observed vector
of shot attempts using on a weighted average of each player’s ξbj :

5 P
i∈c wij ξij
X b
vc · fc (ξbj ) · A∗cj − Acj ,


GLPLc = where fc (ξ j ) = P
b . (15)
j=1 i∈c wij

In (15), wij is a weight proportional to player j’s total observed shot attempts in court cell i over
P
the regular season. The notation i∈c means we are summing over all the 1 ft. by 1 ft. grid
cells that are contained in court region c. Finally, for a given game g and team a, we calculate the
team’s total game LPL (TGLPL) by summing GLPLc over all court regions c and all lineups `:

La X
X
TGLPLag = GLPL`c (16)
`=1 c∈C

where C = {restricted area, mid-range, 3-pointers} and La is the total number of team a’s line-
ups. This process is carried out separately for the home and away teams, yielding two TGLPL
observations per game.
Equipped with a game-level covariate measuring aggregate LPL, we model team a’s game score
against opponent b in game g as

Scoreabg = µ + αa + βb + γ × I(Homeag ) + θ × TGLPLag + abg (17)

abg ∼ N (0, σ 2 ), (18)

where µ represents the global average game score, αa is team a’s offensive strength parameter, βb is
team b’s defensive strength parameter, γ governs home court advantage, θ is the effect of TGLPL,
and abg is a normally distributed error term. θ is the parameter that we are primarily concerned
with. We fit this model in a Bayesian framework using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo methods imple-
mented in Stan (Carpenter et al. 2017). Our prior distributions are as follows: µ ∼ N (100, 102 );
αa , βb , γ, θ ∼ N (0, 102 ); σ ∼ Gamma(shape = 2, rate = 0.2).
The 95% highest posterior density interval for θ is (-1.08, -0.17) and the posterior mean is
-0.62.6 Therefore, we estimate that for each additional lineup point lost, a team loses 0.62 actual
points. Put differently, by shaving roughly 3 points off of their TGLPL, a team could gain an
estimated 2 points in a game. Given that 10% of games were decided by 2 points or less in the
6
Figure 19 in the appendix shows the posterior distribution of θ.

18
2016-17 season, this could have a significant impact on a team’s win-loss record and could even
have playoff implications for teams on the bubble. Figure 11 shows the estimated density of actual
points lost per game for every team’s 82 games in the 2016-17 NBA regular season (i.e. density of
θb × TGLPLag , g ∈ {1, . . . , 82} for each team a). Houston was the most efficient team, only losing
about 1 point per game on average due to inefficient shot allocation. Washington, on the other
hand, lost over 3 points per game on average from inefficient shot allocation.

Distribution of Actual Points Lost per Game from LPL

Washington
Brooklynn
New Orleans
Memphis
Oklahoma City
Denver
Boston
Atlanta
Cleveland
Sacramento
Dallas
Golden State
Points Lost
Portland
6
Miluakee
Team

Miami 4
Detroit
San Antonio 2

Phoenix
0
New York
Philidelphia
Minnesota
Chicago
Charlotte
Utah
Indiana
L.A. Clippers
Toronto
L.A. Lakers
Orlando
Houston
0 2 4 6
Actual Points Lost

Figure 11: Estimated density of actual points lost per game for every team’s 82 games in the 2016-17 NBA
regular season.

19
4.3 How can LPL inform strategy?
At this point, we offer some ideas for how coaches might use these methods to improve their teams’
offense. First, for lineups with high LPL, coaches could explore the corresponding PLC plots to
ascertain which players are primarily responsible. If the coach determines that the LPL values
do indeed represent areas of inefficiency, they could consider interventions targeting the player’s
shooting habits in these areas. This short-term intervention could be coupled with long-term
changes to their practice routines; coaches could work with players on improving their FG% in
the areas shown by the PLC plots. Also, by exploring lineup PLC charts, coaches could identify
systematic inefficiency in their offensive schemes, which could prompt changes either in whom to
draw plays for or whether to change certain play designs altogether.
Coaches are not the only parties who could gain value from these metrics; players and front
office personnel could utilize them as well. Players could use PLC plots to evaluate their shooting
habits and assess whether they exhibit over-confident or under-confident shot-taking behavior from
certain areas of the court. Front office personnel may find trends in the metrics that indicate a need
to sign players that better fit their coach’s strategy. LPL and PLC could help them identify which
players on their roster to shop and which players to pursue in free agency or the trade market.
Consider these ideas in context of the Utah Jazz LPL/PLC charts for the 2016-17 regular season
shown in Figure 12.
Utah 2016−17 Starting Lineup Utah 2016−17 Starting Lineup
G. Hill R. Hood G. Hayward D. Favors R. Gobert G. Hill R. Hood G. Hayward D. Favors R. Gobert

LPL per 36 LPL per Shot

0.03 0.125
0.100
0.02 0.075
0.050
0.01
0.025
0.00 0.000

George Hill Rodney Hood Gordon Hayward Derrick Favors Rudy Gobert

PLC per shot

0.050
0.025
0.000
−0.025
−0.050

Shot Shot
Figure 12: Utah Jazz 2016-17 starting lineup LPL,
d LPLd , and PLC
d surfaces.

On reviewing the LPL per shot plot for the starting lineup, the coach might flag the left baseline

20
 and top of the key as areas of potential inefficiency to investigate. On exploring the corresponding
PLC plots, they would see Derrick Favors as the driving force behind the high LPL numbers from
these regions. Interestingly, from the 2013-14 season through 2016-17, the Derrick Favors baseline
and elbow jump shots were go-to plays for the Jazz. Across these four seasons, Favors took over
1500 mid-range shots for an average of 0.76 points per shot (PPS).
In the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons, the Jazz drastically altered Favors’ shot policy from the
mid-range. Beginning in 2017, the Jazz started focusing on running plays for 3-pointers and shots
at the rim, a trend that was becoming popular throughout the league. As part of this change in
play-style, they tried turning Favors into a stretch four7 ; he went from taking a total of 21 3-point
shots over the previous four seasons, to 141 3-point shots in these two seasons alone. Unfortunately,
their intervention for Favors appears to have been misguided; his average PPS for these 141 shots
was 0.66. The front office eventually determined that Favors wasn’t the best fit for their coach’s
offensive strategy; they opted not to re-sign Favors at the end of the 2019 season.
This process took place over six yearsperhaps it could have been expedited had LPL and PLC
been available to the coaches and front office staff.

4.4 Is minimizing LPL always optimal?

While we have demonstrated that lower LPL is associated with increased offensive production, we
stress that LPL is a diagnostic tool that should be used to inform basketball experts rather than
as a prescriptive measure that should be strictly adhered to in all circumstances. As mentioned
previously, the LPL and PLC values presented in this paper are influenced by contextual variables
that we are unable to account for because they are not available in public data sources, such as the
shot clock and defensive pressure. Additionally, there are certain game situations where minimizing
LPL may be sub-optimal.
One such situation is illustrated in Figure 13, which shows the PLCShot surfaces for the Okla-
homa City 2016-17 starting lineup.
Russell Westbrook Andre Roberson Steven Adams Victor Oladipo Domantas Sabonis

PLC per shot

0.10
0.05
0.00
−0.05

Shot
Figure 13: Oklahoma City 2016-17 starting lineup PLC
d surfaces.

The first panel from the left in this figure shows positive PLC values for Russell Westbrook in
7
A stretch four is a player at the power forward position that can generate offense farther from the basket than a
traditional power forward.

21
the corner 3-point regions, suggesting that Westbrook should be taking more shots from these areas.
However, anyone who watched the Thunder play that season will know that many of these corner
3-point opportunities were created by Westbrook driving to the basket, drawing extra defenders
toward him, then kicking the ball out to an open teammate in the corner. Obviously, Westbrook
cannot both drive to the rim and simultaneously pass to himself in another area of the court. In this
case, strictly minimizing LPL would reduce the number of these drive-and-kick plays, potentially
attenuating their offensive firepower. Shot-creation is not accounted for by LPL and should be
carefully considered when exploring LPL and PLC.
There are game theoretic factors to be considered as well. Beyond the defensive elements
discussed in Section 4.1, rigid adherence to minimizing LPL could lead to a more predictable offense
and thus make it easier to defend (D’Amour et al. 2015). Needless to say, offensive game-planning
should be informed by more than LPL metrics alone.

5 Conclusion
Our research introduces novel methods to evaluate allocative efficiency spatially and shows that this
efficiency has a real impact on game outcomes. We use publicly available data and have made an
empirical demonstration of our methods available online, allowing our methods to be immediately
accessible. Also, since LPL and PLC do not depend on specific models for FG% and FGA rate,
LPL and PLC could readily be calculated at G-league, NCAA, and international levels using a
simplified model of FG% and FGA rate.
As most professional basketball teams have access to proprietary data, many of the contextual
variables that we do not account for could be included in the FG% and FGA rate models, which
could make the proposed shot distribution proposed by LPL a more reliable optimum to seek.
Additionally, by pairing LPL with play call data coaches could gain insight into the efficiency of
specific plays. Even without access to these data, it may be possible to recreate some contextual
features that aren’t explicitly provided by the NBA’s public-facing API. For instance, shot clock
times could be reverse engineered using game clock times given in the play-by-play data.
There are interesting academic questions that stem from this paper as well. Future studies
could investigate the sensitivity of our metrics to model parameters that we fixed, such as the
number of basis functions in the NMF and the number of neighbors in the CAR prior. We could
also investigate the robustness of LPL to alternate FG% models. As mentioned previously, we
do not account for usage curves in our analysis. Doing so would turn LPL into a constrained
optimization problem, which would be a fascinating challenge to tackle. Also, using LPL to inform
player-specific shot policy changes, entire seasons could be simulated using the method in Sandholtz
& Bornn (2020) to quantify the impact of specific shot allocation changes on point production. We
hope that the methods introduced in this paper will be built upon and improved.

22
6 Appendix

6.1 Empirical Implementation

To illustrate some important considerations associated with this approach, we present a brief ex-
ample of LPL and PLC using empirical FG% and FGA rates. This example demonstrates that
these quantities are agnostic to the underlying FG% model.
We examine the same lineup for the Cavaliers that is discussed in the main text. In order to
obtain FG% and FGA rate estimates, we divide the court into twelve discrete regions and calculate
the empirical values for each player within these regions. We defined these regions based on our
understanding of the court, but it is worth noting that defining these regions requires many of the
same considerations as with any histogram style estimator; namely, that increasing the number
of regions will decrease bias at the expense of increasing variance. In some cases, a player may
have only one or two shots within an area, resulting in either unrealistically high or low field goal
percentage estimates. As an ad hoc solution to this, we give all players one made field goal and
five field goal attempts within each region, which means that players with just a handful of shots
in a region will have their associated field goal percentage anchored near 20 percent. Rather than
perform smoothing for the field goal attempt estimates, we simply count up the number of attempts
for each player within each section, and normalize them to get the attempts per 36 minutes, as
before. With these FG% and FGA estimates, we can replicate the analysis detailed in Section 3.
Figure 14 shows the empirical ranks for this lineup, as well as the rank correspondence. Gener-
ally, it shows the same patterns as the model-based analysis in Figures 5 and 6. However, there are
some key differences, including Tristan Thompson having a higher field goal percentage rank from
the right midrange and a corresponding reduction in rank for Kevin Love in the same area. This
pattern is also manifest in Figure 15, which shows the empirical LPL. We observe that most lineup
points appear to be lost in the right midrange and in above the break three point shots. Finally,
considering the empirical PLC in Figure 15, we notice that in addition to the Love-Thompson
tradeoff in the midrange, JR Smith appears to be overshooting from the perimeter, while Kyrie
Irving and LeBron James both exhibit undershooting.
The persistence of the Love-Thompson connection in the midrange in this empirical analysis,
and its divergence from what we saw in the model based analysis, merits a brief discussion. Kevin
Love and Tristan Thompson both had a low number of shots from the far-right midrange region,
with Love shooting 8 for 26 and Thompson shooting 4 for 6. Because they both shot such a low
amount of shots, even with the penalty of one make and four misses added to each region, Thompson
appears far better. This highlights the fact that although LPL and PLC are model agnostic, the
underlying estimates for field goal percentage do matter and raw empirical estimates alone may be
too noisy to be useful in calculating LPL. One simple solution may be to use a threshold and only
consider players in a region if the number of their field goal attempts passes that threshold.

23
 JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving LeBron James Tristan Thompson

FG% Rank
1
2
3
4
5

JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving LeBron James Tristan Thompson

FGA Rank
1
2
3
4
5

JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving LeBron James Tristan Thompson

Rank Diff
4
3
2
1
0
−1
−2
−3
−4

Figure 14: Top: Empirical FG% ranks for the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup. Middle: Empirical FGA
ranks. Bottom: Rank correspondence.

Cleveland 2016−17 Starting Lineup Cleveland 2016−17 Starting Lineup

L. James J. Smith K. Love K. Irving T. Thompson L. James J. Smith K. Love K. Irving T. Thompson

LPL per 36 LPL per shot

0.6 0.100
0.075
0.4
0.050
0.2
0.025
0.0 0.000

JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving LeBron James Tristan Thompson

PLC per 36
0.050
0.025
0.000
−0.025
−0.050

Figure 15: Top: Empirical LPL and LPLShot for the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup. Bottom: Empirical
PLC for the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup.

24
6.2 Additional Figures
LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson

LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson FG% Rank
20% Quantile
LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson FG%1Rank
20% Quantile
FG%21Rank
20% 3Quantile
2
4
1
3
5
2
4
3
5
LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson 4
5
LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson FG% Rank
Median
LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson FG%1Rank
Median
FG%21Rank
Median
3
2
4
1
3
5
2
4
3
5
LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson 4
5
LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson FG% Rank
80% Quantile
LeBron James JR Smith Kevin Love Kyrie Irving Tristan Thompson FG%1Rank
80% Quantile
FG%21Rank
80% 3Quantile
2
4
1
3
5
2
4
3
5
4
5

Figure 16: Top: 20% quantiles of the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup posterior distributions of FG%
ranks. Middle: medians of these distributions. Bottom: 80% quantiles.

M
Cleveland Cavliers: Distribution of ∑ LPLi
i=1

140

120

100
Frequency

80

60

40

20

0 1 2 3 4 5 6
M
∑ LPLi
i=1

PM
Figure 17: Histogram of i=1 LPLi for the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup. 500 posterior draws from
PM
each ξij , where i ∈ {1 . . . , M } and j ∈ {1, . . . , 5}, were used to compute the 500 variates of i=1 LPLi
comprising this histogram.

25
 LPL 20% Quantile (per 36) LPL Median (per 36) LPL 80% Quantile (per 36)
2016−17 CLE Starting Lineup: 2016−17 CLE Starting Lineup: 2016−17 CLE Starting Lineup:
James Smith Love Irving Thompson James Smith Love Irving Thompson James Smith Love Irving Thompson

LPL per 36 LPL per 36 LPL per 36

0.06 0.06 0.06

0.04 0.04 0.04

0.02 0.02 0.02

LPL 20% Quantile (per shot) LPL Median (per shot) LPL 80% Quantile (per shot)
2016−17 CLE Starting Lineup: 2016−17 CLE Starting Lineup: 2016−17 CLE Starting Lineup:
James Smith Love Irving Thompson James Smith Love Irving Thompson James Smith Love Irving Thompson

LPL per Shot LPL per Shot LPL per Shot

0.25 0.25 0.25
0.20 0.20 0.20
0.15 0.15 0.15
0.10 0.10 0.10
0.05 0.05 0.05

Figure 18: Left: 20% quantile LPL surfaces for the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup. Middle: median
LPL surfaces. Bottom: 80% quantile LPL surfaces. The top rows show LPL36 while the bottom rows show
LPLShot .

θ Posterior Distribution

1.5

1.0
Density

0.5

0.0

−1.5 −1.0 −0.5 0.0

Figure 19: Posterior distribution of the effect for TGLPL in model (17)-(18) described in Section 4.2.

26
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