Three Point Shooting Trends By Class

I'm on a three point shooting roll as of late. My first post was regressing team three point shooting from the 2001-02 season through this year. My second post regressed individual three point shooting in the B1G Ten, only this time frame was 1998-99 through this year. One of the things I probably should've started with is how players improve from year-to-year. What I did was use the data I collected for the individual season three point shooting, and simply summed the number of shots made and attempted by freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. The only cutoff is that my data only has players who attempted at least 10 threes in a single season. So it's not all encompassing, but I'm probably not missing much.

If you like your data in table form or graph form, I've got it both ways below the jump.

My database that I extracted from the College Basketball section of Sports Reference had positions listed. Since three point shooting is largely for guards and wings, I figured it wouldn't be an accurate look at how the players progressed if I included forwards and centers in there. There were some players listed as G/F and F/G and I've included them as well. It did a pretty good job, but I may have missed someone, though a few misses won't throw off the data much, if at all.

First, the number of made and attempted three point shots broken down by class.

Click the image to enlarge. The number of players in each sample are 166 freshmen, 169 sophomores, 171 juniors, and 168 seniors. Freshmen get fewer shots, as one would expect. Eyeballing the games played numbers, I think the freshmen were getting into most games, but if I had minutes played instead of just games, we'd likely see a large separation in the amount of minutes played by freshman compared to upper-classman-- again, not a surprise.

Here we have the regressed three point percentage for each class.

I was torn on how to present this. If I leave the y-axis as Excel auto-fit at .300 and above, it gives an artificial look that there's great improvement from year-to-year when in reality, we're talking a minimal change. There is improvement, but it's not by leaps-and-bounds.

Finally, here's a graph of the change in percentage from freshman to sophomores, sophomores to juniors and juniors to seniors in regressed three point percentage:

The largest change clearly comes from a players freshman to sophomore years. Again, that is not unexpected. There's a steep learning curve from high school into a players freshman campaign, so it only makes sense that they improve the most after having a full season under their belts to learn how to be a bit more refined college player versus just a talented high school player.

If you're more of a table person, All of the data above is found below:

And the data that went into the final graph is in the following table:

Also of note: sophomores take 27% more threes than freshman, juniors take 12% more than sophomores and seniors take 7% more than juniors. Again, freshmen see fewer minutes and percentage of the offense than all the other classes.