Pace Adjusted Foul Draw

[penbeast0]

Curious whether modern players get more calls once pace is taken out of the equation. Anyone with a sortable database that can give us the top 20 pace adjusted foul draws (by season or by career)?

[tsherkin]

Just run the seasonal stats from DougStats and use FTA/FGA as a rough measure, that'll give you the per-shot rate at which guys are drawing fouls. Hell, you can do it off of full-season stats too, if you want to see how the whole league is doing in one snap-shot.

[SideshowBob]

Hoopdata.com has the FTA/FGA info for the past 4 years, though you have to set the parameters to get rid of the low minute/low game guys.

http://hoopdata.com/scoringstats.aspx

[Chicago76]

You may want to look at F/FGA too. One issue with FTA/FGA across eras is that free throw rules have changed:

-three to make two
-two to make one
-flagrants
-the bonus after X fouls in a quarter or x time left in a quarter/half, etc.

I'm not sure how the three to make two rule was recorded. If a player made the first, misssed the second, and made the third, was his stat line 2/2 or 2/3? I think it was 2/3, but I'm not sure.

If you want to go w/ the full F/estimated possessions by year, it may be easy to copy and paste the league average line from the team statistics table for every year from b-r (1961-62 is here): http://www.basketball-reference.com/leagues/NBA_1962.html

If you're feeling really ambitious, you might want to control for usage patterns across positions in different eras. For example, FTA/FGA in the early 60s was higher than it is today or in the late 70s/early 80s. Intuitively, it doesn't make sense to me at least. I would expect a faster pace environment to be due to guys taking the first open shot they see. The first open shot would lead to a lower F/FGA...unless it led to a massive scrum under the basket due to lower FG% of the era. Or the higher foul rates could be due to the centers of the era. You could look at F/FGA or FTA/FGA of small forwards and guards only across years if the numbers look a little funny to see if this is the case.

[penbeast0]

Was sort of hoping one of y'all would do it since I am too lazy.

[Chicago76]

Was sort of hoping one of y'all would do it since I am too lazy.

Since you came out and admitted it, I pulled it up on my excel

By F/FGA, the least frequent seasons were 1958 to 1962 and 1970 to 1974 + 1967.

The most frequent seasons were generally 1982-86 and 1995-2000, excluding the pre-shot clock era, which had the highest F/FGA.