Wade's distance shooting through the years

[mopper8]

Basketball-reference has a new feature, breaking down players' shooting % by shot location back to 03-04. The numbers don't matchup with those from hoopdata.com, so I'm not sure what their source is, but regardless, it at least gives us some guidance on trends and such. Here are Wade's shooting %s from 16-23 feet since his rookie year

Code: Select all

year |  04  |  05  |  06  |  07  |  08  |  09  |  10  |  11  |  12
%    |  31  |  42  |  41  |  37  |  37  |  42  |  36  |  40  |  36
a/g  |  2.5 |  5.3 |  7.4 |  7.3 |  6.5 |  7.7 |  4.9 |  4.0 |  4.1


You can play around with all the functions here, they have a lot of cool stuff.

Clearly (and perhaps unsurprisingly) Wade's best years were easily 05-06 and 08-09, when he combines significant volume with 41+% shooting. Worth nothing that his % has been quickly on the rise this season after being lower early in the year. I don't think its beyond the realm for him to end up in the low 40s by the end of the season.

You can compare to the 2007 and beyond numbers at hoopdata here

[toodles23]

Interesting how good Wade was from there already in '05, what happened to his shot after '06? He was 25 of 46 (54%) from 16-23 in the '06 Finals, that's pretty ridiculous.

Wow, big disparity between hoopdata and bballref for 2011 (37% vs 40%). I'm wondering who bball reference gets their numbers from?

Edit: Just realized those numbers from bball reference are combined regular season + postseason, I'm guessing a lot of the difference comes from there.

[mopper8]

Interesting how good Wade was from there already in '05, what happened to his shot after '06? He was 25 of 46 (54%) from 16-23 in the '06 Finals, that's pretty ridiculous.

Wow, big disparity between hoopdata and bballref for 2011 (37% vs 40%). I'm wondering who bball reference gets their numbers from?

What happened after 06 was that he dislocated his shoulder and then instead of getting surgery, he came back that season, played awful, and then played mediocre the following season while not at 100%

That injury definitely significantly changed the arc of his career IMO

[tsherkin]

Should also been throwing in AST%, that's a fairly important consideration. And yeah, coming back instead of getting surgery was stupid. Really, really stupid.

[Moggs24]

I think wade has been doing a nice job with his shot recently. He seems to be focusing on being balanced and keeping arc in his shot. When he came back from injury it was clear he had improved his FT shooting and I think it is now crossing over to his mid range game.

If you look at 09 - current it really makes no sense that his shot just disappeared. The 08-09 season Wade's mid-range game was all time great, then in the subsequent seasons he decided to change his style of play somewhat. My opinion was that in that off season he put on a lot of weight and size and just felt like it was easier for him to get to the rim. Since then he seems unwilling to take any shot that is not at the rim. But like I said he is playing much more like he did in 08-09 recently as he seems really comfortable with his role in the offense.

[GreenHat]

Couldn't these just be random fluctuations?

Not huge samples (86 shots this year, 300ish shots last year) so I would be careful to draw conclusions based on accuracy. The difference between 36% and 42% (his worst and best numbers through the last several years) would only be like 5 shots this season and only about 18 shots over the whole season last year.

That doesn't seem all that significant to me and could just be shots rimming out or rolling in.

What is more significant to me is that he is taking less of these long 2s, which is a good thing.

[tsherkin]

What is more significant to me is that he is taking less of these long 2s, which is a good thing.

Is he, though? At 5.1/g, he's taking ~ as many as he did in 2010, which is to say +1.4 over last season. He's taking fewer 3s, but he's taking plenty of long two-pointers.