How Science Built the Best Shooter in the NBA Draft

Reed Sheppard arrived at the University of Kentucky last season as a decent shooter. Both his parents had played basketball for the Wildcats, meaning he’d been schooled in the nuances of swishing a basketball through an 18-inch hoop since his first attempts on a kiddie rim.

But when Sheppard was selected by the Houston Rockets with the third pick in Wednesday’s NBA draft, it wasn’t because he’s a decent shooter. It’s because, during his lone season in college, he transformed into something entirely different.

He became the best long-range shooter in the country.

The story of Sheppard’s one-year overhaul doubles as the story of how data is reshaping the very foundations of sports. At Kentucky, he became obsessed with a screen affixed to the wall at the practice facility, whose readouts told him how close he’d gotten to the perfect shot. Sheppard would hoist a 3-pointer, watch the net ripple, and look immediately at the “Splash Board,” which told him how close to the platonic ideal of arc and aim he’d just gotten.

“He was looking at the Splash Board on every shot, every day,” said John Carter, CEO of Noah Basketball, the shot-tracking company that manufactures the product. “He was just so dialed into it.”

Noah’s technology, which is used by nearly every NBA team, focuses on distinctions much finer than simple makes and misses. Using cameras installed above a court, it tracks a shot’s angle, depth, and left-right aim, and supplies instant readouts on its massive screen. Shots that land in the ideal range of all three metrics—approaching the basket at 45 degrees, just grazing the back rim on its way down—register as “splashes.”

As soon as he got to Lexington last summer, Sheppard started a new routine centered around that board. Every afternoon, he’d walk onto the Wildcats’ practice floor accompanied by John Welch, an assistant coach who had spent the previous two decades helping NBA stars refine their shooting strokes. Then Sheppard would fire up some country music and set to work. He’d launch one 3-pointer after another—almost always from the NBA line nearly 20 inches deeper than the college arc—and make adjustments, aiming for the perfect score.

“You can know if your shot feels good,” Sheppard said, “but you’re not gonna shoot it and look [at the ball] and be like, ‘It was 45 arc.’ Having that immediate feedback is really cool.”

There was just one problem: Sheppard quickly became too good of a shooter for the workouts to yield much benefit. “Standard catch-and-shoot just became too easy for him,” Welch said. So Welch recruited other members of the program—including a 7-foot team manager—to leap toward Sheppard with their arms raised while Sheppard shot. And still the pattern held: splash, splash, splash.

During Kentucky’s actual games, the transformation was obvious. In his last season of high-school and AAU basketball, Sheppard made 32% of his 3-pointers. In his one season in Kentucky blue he made 52%, the highest mark in the whole country.

Even though he came off the bench, Sheppard emerged as one of the Wildcats’ most feared offensive weapons. And NBA teams quickly started sending him to the tops of their draft boards.

The amazing thing is that the official numbers weren’t even Sheppard’s most impressive ones. According to Carter’s data, he had the best make- and splash-percentages of any college basketball player whose team used the Noah system.

The analysis offered by the Splash Board goes beyond merely codifying shooting. It actually upends decades of inherited wisdom about the best way to get a ball into a basket. Welch explained that he used to believe the classic “swish,” arcing high and landing perfectly in the center of the rim, was the ideal shot. “It’s so pretty,” he said. “It’s like a snowflake, it pops the net.”

But when he began working with Carter’s data during his time in the NBA, he quickly realized that the most accurate shooters actually shoot the ball on a slightly lower line, which gives them greater range. They also tend to clip the back of the rim, because aiming deeper in the basket increases the margin for error. According to Welch, some 70% of 3-point misses fall short.

Still, Welch said, there can be a risk if players become too fixated on their numbers. He remembered an afternoon when Sheppard seemed to be overthinking things, his shots sailing long or coming up short.

“I thought it might be in his head, I was just getting ready to say something,” Welch said. “And then he made 42 straight 3s.”

Write to Robert O’Connell at [email protected]