In Love with the Mid-Range

Welcome to the Lens, version 46. If you are new, this is our every-other-week commentary on hoops. It’s also where we share what’s new at SportsVisio.

For ten years, the smartest people in basketball said the same thing: stop shooting the midrange. Threes and layups, nothing in between. Whole franchises got rebuilt around the math.

Then you turn on the Finals, and the best player on the floor is one win from a title because he lives there.

Here's what the hot-take crowd gets wrong. The numbers never failed. The math never said those shots DON’T work. It said most players can't make enough of them to matter. Jalen Brunson can, and the same numbers that buried the midrange are the ones that prove he's the exception.

You just have to read one layer deeper than the box score. That's this issue.

In this issue:

• The one stat to learn first (we just rewrote the guide)

• Around the world — four players who lit it up these past two weeks

• Brunson's shot chart, and why his midrange breaks the rule everyone quotes

• Kicks of the Finals

You don't need a stats degree to read a box score.

We just rewrote our most-read guide from the ground up: every basketball stat, from the basic counting numbers up to the advanced metrics NBA front offices live by. Plain language, the formulas that matter, quick examples so they stick.

The one to learn first? True shooting percentage. It's the cleanest measure of how efficiently a player scored, because it counts twos, threes, and free throws together:

TS% = Pts ÷ (2 × (FGA + 0.44 × FTA))

55% is solid. 60% and up is elite. Anywhere near 50% means a player is working too hard for the points they're getting.

The hard part was never knowing which stats matter. It's getting them every game without a parent on clipboard duty. That's the part SportsVisio handles, from a single recording.

Read the full guide →

Around the World

We love watching our players ball out, all over the world. Before the analytics land, before the shot chart, before any of it, there's the part we'll never get tired of.

Different gyms. Different countries. Same look on their face when the highlight drops. Here are four from the last couple of weeks.

Tag us in your highlights or send me a note. You might be next.

The Numbers Room: The Finals, Read Through the Numbers

Want to see the numbers room at work? Turn on the Finals.

After the dramatic Game 4, the Knicks lead the series 3-1 and sit one win from their first title since 1973. The engine is still a guard who breaks the modern math. In a league that spent a decade declaring the midrange dead, Jalen Brunson keeps generating buckets from exactly the spots the analytics crowd told everyone to abandon.

He's a genuine outlier, and the chart shows exactly why. Over the last five seasons (446 games), Brunson is a 47.8% shooter who is elite at the rim (62.8%) but does roughly a third of his damage from the mid-range, taking 2,773 mid-range shots at 48.5%. That's the shot the entire analytics era has tried to kill, and he's built a career on it. While most modern lead guards funnel everything to the rim and the three-point line, Brunson lives in the in-between, the floater range and the elbows, and converts it at a clip that makes the "inefficient" shot efficient for him.

His three-point profile is comparatively ordinary (37.6% overall, with corner 3s at 42.8% outpacing his 36.5% above-the-break threes), which underlines the point: he's not winning with volume threes; he's winning with footwork, change of pace, and a mid-range game that looks like it time-traveled from 2005. So the outlier story isn't his efficiency, it's his shot selection.

He thrives in the zone the rest of the league has agreed to avoid.

That's the whole point of reading a game through the numbers. The final score tells you who won. The chart tells you why, and what to take away for next time. The Finals get that treatment on national TV every night. Starting next week, so does your team.

Jalen’s Kicks

The other Finals storyline is on Brunson's feet, and for once the shoes are part of the scouting report.

He opened Game 1 in the Nike Kobe 3, went 5-for-15 in the first half, and looked stuck. At the break he switched to the Nike Kobe 6 "Lilac" and scored 13 of his 30 in the closing minutes. "It's gotta be the shoes" stopped being a joke for a night. Game 2 came in the Kobe 6 "Knightfall." Foot Locker read the moment and dropped a limited Kobe 5 Protro "NYvsNY" ahead of Game 3.

Brunson has run the Kobe line since high school. Fitting, for a player whose whole game is built on the same footwork and shot-making Kobe spent twenty years perfecting. The shoes change. The midrange doesn't. More here:

If your team or league already runs on SportsVisio, we’ve got some new badges, trophies, and analytics coming your way this month - stay tuned!

If you're not on SportsVisio yet, book a demo this week, and we'll walk you through the numbers room. Book a demo →

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