FanPost

Number of 3 point attempts shouldn't be surprising

I came across an article on Yardbarker from a few years ago before Mark Turgeon's first season at College park. In the article it states that:

Since 2003, the average Division 1 team shoots about thirty three percent of their total field goal attempts from beyond the arc. In that same time span, Maryland has shot only twenty five percent of their field goal attempts from three-point range.

Now we all know how Gary felt about the 3 point shot. He would much rather have something closer to the basket so this is no surprise. Also Gary's teams had success running the flex, so why change what was working.

It is also stated that:

Mark Turgeon’s teams in that span never took less than thirty percent (well, 29.9 to be exact) of their total field goal attempts from three-point land, averaging 33.5 percent of their total field goal attempts from beyond the arc.

Mark obviously likes the bonus shot more than Gary and that is okay as well, as long you can hit a decent percentage of them.

This year, according to Sports-Reference.com, the Terps have attempted 1053 shots and 351 of those have been 3-point attempts. This works out to 33.33% of their shots being 3-point attempts. Right at the average Turgeon seems to prefer.

The point is this, maybe after watching the flex for so long, we became unaccustomed to seeing the average number of three pointers taken by most teams so now it seems like MD is shooting a disproportionate amount of long range shots. In reality they are averaging what most teams do as far as shots from the perimeter go. It also seems to be the number that Turgeon is comfortable with so we should probably get used to it as long as he is here.

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