STARKVILLE — Mike Moynihan, Mississippi State’s director of men’s basketball operations, tells the story of watching sophomore guard Quinndary Weatherspoon make 34 3-pointers in a row. Stories of this lore are not uncommon in the basketball world, yet most coaches have no definitive answer for how to translate a reasonable amount of that success to games.
Moynihan and MSU now have the data at their disposal to get some of those answers — and get it in the form of immediate feedback.
“We were down there watching him and for about the last 12 of those, I think his arc was 46 (degrees),” Moynihan said. “It was just 46, 46, 46, 46, 46, 46, 46, which tells us his release point was the exact same while he was in a groove and his body is locked in.”
This is merely the surface of the data Noah Basketball provides for MSU basketball. Noah Basketball’s shot tracking system tracks every shot taken in MSU’s practice facility at Mize Pavilion since it was installed in October, including where each shot was taken from, and measures its arc entering the rim, how deep into the rim it was when it entered and how far left or right of center it was.
The result — paired with Noah Basketball’s data researched and verified by millions of shots tracked — gives MSU a very precise measurement, collected over thousands of shots by each player, of what minor adjustments each player can make to their shots to optimize shooting percentage.
“That’s when you start developing muscle memory and that’s when you start becoming a good shooter,” Moynihan said.
The perfect shot
An oversimplification of the process of becoming a good shooter could be described as the consistent repetition of a high-percentage shot path. If one shoots a high percentage shot in every single attempt, with as little deviation as humanly possible between attempts, it stands to reason that said shooter will make a high percentage of his shots.
The only thing needed was determining what made a high-percentage shot; John Carter did it.
Carter, the CEO of Noah Basketball, is based less than 200 miles away in northern Alabama. He is an Auburn educated engineer and has his own credentials to take on a project such as finding the measurements of the perfect basketball shot. That being said, he found someone better: a Princeton- and Stanford-educated scientist.
That study showed shots that enter the rim at an arc of 45 degrees and do so 11 inches into the rim — so two inches behind the center of the rim’s 18-inch diameter — are the most likely to go in.
Just being privy to that finding has changed how MSU coaches shooting. It has strayed away from the common more arc is better approach to shooting; for example, with freshman guard Eli Wright, Noah Basketball exposed that his shot had too much arc. Both Moynihan and Carter explained that an arc too high comes with lesser distance control and, inherently, less consistency.
This finding was a bit counterintuitive at first, as this prototypical shot would hit the back rim, contradictory to the decades-old pursuit of a nothing-but-net shot. Then came the next step — data collection from real shooters.
Carter measured shots from great shooters like Chris Mullen and Mark Price, then used shots by active Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat players, as well as a shooting machine he spent a year building. As the number of shots measured climbed into the thousands and tens of thousands, the data of real shots supported the finding of the study.
“None of the great shooters do that. A good percentage of their shots, some as much as half of their shots, hit the back of the rim,” Carter said. “We call that a BRAD shot, an old acronym for back rim and down. If the top half of the ball hits the back of the rim, it’s going to score. People just do not get the ball deep enough in the basket, which is why roughly 70 percent of misses are short.”
Noah Basketball’s expanded system that MSU uses has now collected data on more than 8 million shots by the NBA, college and high school teams that have purchased the service. Its findings have been corroborated with every shot, including the five NBA franchises that use it, including the Golden State Warriors.
Noah Basketball’s first service was one that could only measure free throws; its most recent model, which MSU uses and Carter estimates is used by roughly 15 college programs, can measure shots from anywhere on the court. Carter expects more programs to add the expanded service in the offseason when he has more time to market the relatively new product. MSU paid just less than $10,000 to install the product plus a couple hundred dollars per year for a data package.
“I could look at these numbers all day.”
The courtside black boxes have sign in and sign out capabilities, so players can alert the tracking system who is shooting anytime they come for shootaround sessions. Provided they do that, players and coaches alike can access numerous data points for every single shot they have attempted in the practice facility since October. The data can even be sorted by date/series of dates and location on the floor in addition to its automatic made or missed sorting.
“There’s no fudging these numbers. This is what it is,” Moynihan said. “Over a long period of time, I think you can lose your focus in what you’re doing. I think it’s important to have everything recorded and in one place. Here’s where you were week one, here’s where you were week two, here’s where you were week three.”
Moynihan, Carter and MSU head coach Ben Howland agree that it is a long-term approach like that one where the system really makes an impact. Over the course of daily shooting sessions over months, the theory is the data can train new habits more likely to replicate a high-percentage shooting arc and do so consistently.
“They’re a team that gets it. They want to shoot the ball better, they want to be in a position to develop their players as best as they can,” Carter said. “This is not an intimidating thing; a lot of technology can be intimidating to players and coaches. You can tell a player, I’m not trying to change your mechanics, I’m not trying to get you to do anything crazy, I just want you to be more consistent. I want you to develop a consistent stroke.”
What has not taken long is selling the concept to the players.
“NBA players resonate with these kids, so if you sit here and say, ‘Here’s Steph Curry and here’s Klay Thompson, here’s Kevin Durant,’ it’s good for them,” Howland said. “I think it’s great to have for our players. I think it really helps them.”
The programming has benefits that range further than simple shot mechanics. It’s ability to discern where shots are being taken from — then sort the data accordingly, including shooting percentage — and keep a tally of sheer number of shots per player will give coaches another measure of accountability over the offseason.
“We’ll be able to say, ‘Hey man, you’re shooting better from the right wing than you are from the left wing. Let’s break that down, why do we think that is?'” Moynihan said. “It can keep guys accountable. I can see here that (Weatherspoon) has taken 25,000 shots and you’ve taken 2,000. What are you doing?”
What’s next?
Moynihan is a self-proclaimed, “numbers guy.” He has embraced the age of analytics that Noah Basketball has ushered MSU into, which is why he loves looking at the shooting numbers and hopes the players do the same in the app they can download to their phones.
He might be more excited to see what happens next.
“There’s a lot of things you can do with it though. Like floaters — our guys love to shoot floaters — but that’s a different shot than a jump shot,” Moynihan said. “What’s the perfect arc for a floater? What are the numbers on that?
“People are going to start buying this.”
Carter agrees; he isn’t thinking about expanding products at the moment, given what MSU is using is still relatively new, but knows more possibilities exist.
“The next thing is recognizing players and recognize what happened before the shot – was it off a screen, catch and shoot, and then move into rebounding,” Carter said. “We’re already tracking the ball, we can see where the misses for each player are going.”
Follow Dispatch sports writer Brett Hudson on Twitter @Brett_Hudson
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