Location, location, location: Examining Thistle's chance creation

What the Jags can learn from a telling trend in basketball

From KD9 to the new era of AS9; from Big Brian Graham to Big Willie Style (Big Willies Sharp and Paul, for the avoidance of doubt¹). Scoring goals is the name of the game.

And to score goals, you need to get the ball in the right areas. So, today, we’re going to think about what it takes to get the ball where it counts.

There’s quite a famous picture that explains something of the impact that data and analysis had on the NBA, originally put together for his book Sprawlball by Kirk Goldsberry.

How NBA shooting fundamentally changed in under 20 years - from distributed around the two-point area to big empty spaces where almost no shots happen. Image credit: Kirk Goldsberry. You can find it here, or in Goldsberry’s book. Image Credit: Kirk Goldsberry

The details don’t really matter, but the idea is: take your shots where the risk and the reward are well balanced. If you take a shot on either side of the three-point line (the outside curved line in the picture), the risk is about the same - it’s a very hard shot to make as you’re so far out. But one step inside the line, the reward is two points, and one step outside, it’s three points.

One step doesn’t change the risk noticeably, but it increases the reward by 50 per cent. So players stopped taking high-risk, low-reward shots just inside the line, and almost exclusively shot from just outside the line (or much, much closer to the basket where the risk of missing was much lower). By 2019, NBA coaches had learned this lesson, and the shot locations in the image show it.

The same is true in football, more or less.

The chart above shows, over the first two games of this Championship season, what proportion of shots are converted to goals in different ‘zones’.

Shot zones, and their different conversion-to-goal rates

If you take a shot from outside the box, you have a 3-4 per cent chance of scoring. If you take a shot from between the posts, and 0-12 yards out (i.e. inside the penalty spot), it rockets up to more than a one in four chance.

Get the ball in the danger zone.

The reward doesn’t change if you take a shot in the box but outside this zone (for every goal is worth exactly one goal … don’t say I don’t give you nuanced analytical insight), but the risk changes a lot. Yes, you might get an entry on a highlight reel. But shots in the danger zone are much, much more likely to convert to a goal. Fewer than one in 10 in-the-box shots outside this zone hit the back of the net, but more than one in four inside the zone do.