μ · EP 007 · June 12, 2026

The Mid-Range Shot Is Dead. So Why Are Teams Making More of Them?

tl;dr

Analytics teams eliminated the mid-range shot. The teams that kept shooting it are hitting it at record rates. The correlation with league-wide analytics adoption is r = 0.73 across 24 seasons. The mechanism borrows from a concept in causal inference: when one group's strategy changes the environment everyone operates in, the other group inherits better conditions without doing anything differently.

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