Simply can?t stand the extreme focus on threes this year.
1000% agree - it has gone way too far.
Celts put up 61 three's tonite @ 34% - ridiculous.
Yeah, they will never win a championship shooting a lot of 3?s. That?s for sure.
It's interesting looking at the shot margins:
Celtics Raptors
Total FG Attempted 99 98
Total FG Made 44 50
% Made 44.4% 51.0%
2pt FG Attempted 38 75
2pt FG Made 23 41
% Made 60.5% 54.7%
3pt FG Attempted 61 23
3pt FG Made 21 9
% Made 34.4% 39.1%
2pt FG attempts as % of total 38.4% 76.5%
3pt FG attempts as % of total 61.6% 23.5%
2pt FG made as % of total made 52.3% 82%
3pt FG made as % of total made 47.7% 18%
Total pts from 2s 46 82
Total pts from 3s 63 27
FT attempted 17 14
FT made 19 21
% made 89.5% 66.7%
So if you were a stat nerd, what would you parse out of this? Each team took about the same number of shots (99 v 98), but 2 in every 3 of our attempts was a 3, while for Toronto 3 in every 4 was a 2. So they took nearly 2x as many 2s as we did, and shot them at 55%. We took half as many 2s and shot slightly better, at 60%. So of our points total, 46 points was from 2s and theirs was 82.
In terms of threes, we took 3x as many as they did (61) and made about a third, so our total points from 3s was 63 points. They took 23 3s and made 9, a bit over a third (40%) for a points total from 3s of 27 points.
So, of the points we scored from field goals, 60% came from beyond the arc while 80% of theirs came from within the arc. Because we took higher value shots, even though we missed more of them, it turned out to be a wash in terms of points (109 vs 109). They had to make 6 more shots than we did to get the same number of points.
Where we won the game really, was in the fact that we made 17 or 19 from the line, they made 14 of 21. That's our 3 point margin right there.
I think for folks who grew up in a time when people weren't just raining what we feel are lower percentage shots from behind the arc all the time, it feels like they're just "chucking" - because as the inimiatable @Kernewek once said, in a game thread, we have two states - happy and sad. When the ball goes thru the rim we are happy. When it doesn't we are sad. And if they are taking more 3s they will miss more shots, so we probably had more moments of sadness in the game than the Raptors fans, because they watched their team make 6 more shots than we did. And when we do make a 3, we don't become 33% more happy because the shot was worth more, because happiness and sadness is a binary thing. And it's quickly forgotten when the next shot is missed

But if I had to hazard a guess, all their stats nerds know this and this is why they're ok with 60 3s attempts because as long as they make enough of them, eventually the other team will have to make a lot more shots than we do to just break even. The issue becomes when we don't make enough of them, and that's when we go beyond sad, to mad
