Failure in the First
Chicago got embarrassed in the first quarter. Well, maybe that isn’t true. I have no idea what it would take for a professional basketball player to feel embarrassed. They looked bad, flat, tired.
There was no transition game. The ball didn’t zip, it stuck.
The first quarter has been getting worse for a while. By the time the Bulls finished their impressive 4-2 Circus Trip, their first quarter plus-minus was over 18. Now, they’re down to a +4.5. One thing to watch for that may be a contributing factor is their 3-point shooting.
Over the course of the season, the first quarter is when they have their highest 3-point field goal percentage, but also take the fewest shots from deep in that same time frame. Much like the chicken and the egg, we need to evaluate what can be inferred.
First, we could infer that the Bulls are an excellent 3-point shooting team in the first quarter. Reasoning could be confidence, rest, defense not picking up on play calls, the only fully-rested extended run of five starters, and so on. It also implies that we assume the success is either independent – they would should with that kind of success regardless of other factors – or it implies that one of the variables, such as fresh legs, presents a significant correlation. This is plausible.
Let’s look at it another way. You could say that some outliers, when noticed, create psychological belief in the shot, leading to more success. Turning an outlier into an actual advantage. That is also possible, and it would skew our data.
Now that I’ve pretended to talk in a scientific manner, I’ll end with this. It could be confidence or it could be fresh legs with more spring when launching shots, but it probably has more to do with the first quarter being the once quarter when they take the fewest attempts from deep, thus a single make weights more heavily because it is being weighed against fewer total attempts. And this is probably at the center of a lot of the issues. They aren’t shooting from deep early, content to connect on one or two attempts in favor of getting up more looks.
On Friday night, it didn’t matter where the Bulls shot from, they were awful. In the first quarter, they shot 22.2 percent, 6-for-27, and converted on just one attempt outside the restricted area. Only one for the entire quarter.
It was bad tonight, it was bad last night and it has been bad for a while. It’s probably going to stay bad so buckle up.