no, the midrange shot is exactly the shot that propels teams to championships, as the rockets of the past 5 years learned the hard way, so much so that d'antoni

no, the midrange shot is exactly the shot that propels teams to championships, as the rockets of the past 5 years learned the hard way, so much so that d'antoni was demoted and harden moved on to a superteam with great midrange shooters (durant & irving). and as great as curry's shot is, the warriors are unlikely to make the playoffs this year. the midrange plays a specific strategic role, and teams pull it out especially for the playoffs. the playoffs are all about effective shot selection, with the midrange becoming prominent because defenses tighten up arond the perimeter and the basket. lebron and anthony davis both explicitly featured their midrange game in last year's championship run. the clippers, incidentally, have the best midrange shooter (kawhi) and lost early last year because they relied too much on the 3-pointer. even the warriors of old used the midrange shot to keep defenses guessing enough to give their shooters space to shoot. and that's exactly the issue with relying too heavily on analytics--humans aren't static, and pinning down the exact parameters where a model is valid is seductively elusive. mathematical models don't so much tell us about how the world is, but rather more about how the modeler sees the world. models aren't useless but they are limited (really knowing how is the hard part).