In defence of the long two

The worst shot in basketball is still the worst shot in basketball, right up until the last six seconds of a playoff possession.

I want to be careful here, because the argument against the twenty-foot jumper was correct and it fixed a genuinely broken era of offence. Taking a contested shot from a foot inside the line, for two points, when you could stand a step back and get three, was madness and it took the sport far too long to admit it.

Fine. Agreed. Now let me complicate it.

The case against the long two assumes you get to choose. Late clock, you don't. When there are five seconds left and a switch has taken away the screen and the defence is sitting on the arc because they know exactly what the model says you want, the mid-range pull-up is not the inefficient alternative to a three. It's the alternative to a turnover or a heave. Comparing it to a corner three is comparing it to something that isn't on offer.

Playoff basketball produces those possessions constantly. Rotations shorten, defences pre-switch, scouting is total, and the beautiful five-out flow that generated open catch-and-shoot looks in February gets strangled by the third game of a series. What survives is a guy who can rise up from eighteen feet over a contest. That skill is the difference between an offence that has a floor and one that goes scoreless for four minutes at a time.

There's a geometric point too. From roughly the elbow extended, a shooter attacking off a screen has the whole floor in front of him and the defender's momentum going backwards. It's the easiest place to shoot from with a hand in your face, precisely because the release doesn't require the extra leg drive that a three from the same balance point does. A fatigued shooter is more accurate at eighteen feet than at twenty-four. That's not a rounding error late in a game.

And the deterrence matters. If a defender knows you won't shoot from there, he doesn't have to respect the pull-up, which means he sits on the drive, which means your rim attempts get worse, which means the three you eventually take comes from a possession where nothing threatened anybody.

I'm not asking anyone to run offence through the elbow. I'm asking coaches to stop treating a made long two as a bad outcome in the film session. Some shots are inefficient in the aggregate and correct in the moment, and the difference between the two is what separates a good scorer from a good shot chart.