After breaking down 2 point shooting and attempting to find a minimum threshold where you wont hurt your team we will go ahead and approach 3 point shots in more or less a totally different way. That makes sense right? Well, I will start
out things about the same but then I will take a totally different approach.
I'll start it off similarly to 2 pointers with a player who takes 100 3 point shots. If he makes all of them he will produce 300 points or 200 points over average. If he misses them all he will produce 30 points (30 offensive rebound chances = 30 points) or 70 points below average. This adds up to either, three pointers made * 3 + (three pointers missed * .3) - three pointers or three pointers made * 2 - three pointers missed * .7
If we use this to determine our minimum efficiency threshold (the point where a player begins to create positive points or credits for his team) we come up with 26 percent 3 point shooting. It's pretty low but it was low on 2 point shooting as well and it is consistent with the model. Well its not what I will use. Our 3 point value is 2.5 points instead of 3 and I will spend the next several paragraphs trying some how to explain how we get this number.
If we use the NBA league average of 36.2 % and credit 3 points per made 3, our team gets about 1.28 points per possession (.28 net).
If we take the NBA league average of 48.4 % and credit 2 points per made 2, our team gets about 1.12 points per possession (.12 net)
If we take the NBA league average of 36.1 % and credit 2.5 points per made 3 to the shooter as our system does, gets our team about 1.10 points per possession.(.10 net)