Heat's Offensive Slump, Free Throw Focus, Travel Metrics and Pull-Up Artistry

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Welcome to the NBA Librarian Weekly, where we curate and summarize the best NBA content of the week.

<1000 words each week, I consume and summarize so you don’t have to.

In Today's Edition

1. The Miami Heat’s Decline on Offense

2. Which Team Travels the Most in the NBA?

3. Athletes & The Quiet Eye Phenomenon

4. Jalen Williams and the Art of the Pull-Up

5. Obscure NBA Leaders

The Miami Heat’s Decline on Offense

John delves into the reasons behind the Miami Heat's offensive decline since their standout performance in the NBA's lockdown Disney bubble era.

Key takeaways:

1. Isolation and Post-Ups Increase: The Heat's reliance on these plays has grown, from 7.4% in 2020 to 12.7% in 2024.

2. Decrease in Off-Ball Movements: Activities like spot-ups, handoffs, off-ball screens, and cuts have decreased from 43% to 40.8% in the last season.

3. Efficiency on Cuts Deteriorated: Once nearly top 10 in 2020, their ranking plummeted to as low as 30th in subsequent years (23, 30, 23, 25th the last 4 years).

4. Decline in Handoff Actions: From consistently ranking in the top 4, they fell to 11th this year.

5. Increased Mid-Range Attempts: Particularly by Adebayo, short mid-range shots grew from around 18% in 2020 and 2021 to over 26% in 2023 and 2024.

The shift toward isolation and an over-reliance on mid-range jumpers has diminished the dynamism of Miami's offense, steering them away from the cohesive, fluid style that marked their bubble offensive success. As the new season approaches, whether the Heat can recalibrate and reignite their offensive prowess remains to be seen.

Which Team Travels the Most in the NBA?

Fascinating and thorough article here discussing how to optimize team travel using the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). The NBA's structure adds complexity with its 30 teams each playing 82 games, resulting in a total of 1,230 games each season.

Shreyans delves into the distances between each team's stadiums. He calculates and sums up the travel distances for intra-division, inter-division, and inter-conference games for every team. Some notable observations from this analysis include:

• The Trail Blazers travel the most of any team, covering almost 1.5 times the distance that the Indiana Pacers do.

• The Western Conference teams travel 3 million more kilometers compared to those in the Eastern Conference. This makes sense given the denser clustering of teams in the East.