Tired legs miss short, and that is a coaching tool

Charting whether misses fall short or fly long tells a bench more about fatigue than any wearable strapped to a player.

Front rim. Front rim again. A shooter who was burying everything in the first half is suddenly leaving them a few inches low, and the answer is not in his hands.

Distance on a jump shot comes from the legs. The arms control direction and release, the base controls range, and when the base fades the ball lands short. Consistently short. That is why the pattern is diagnostic in a way that a general sense of tiredness is not: a player who is missing short in the fourth quarter is telling you exactly how much he has left, and he is telling you before he knows it himself.

Long misses mean something different, usually overcorrection or adrenaline, which is why a substitute coming off the bench cold will often airmail his first attempt. Left and right misses are alignment, a base that arrived turned. Three failure modes, three different conversations, and most benches lump all of them together as a cold night.

I would have someone charting it. Not with a tracking system. With a clipboard and four columns, which is how the useful version of this was done long before anyone had cameras in the rafters, and which requires nothing more than a coach who is willing to watch the rim instead of the ball.

What you get is a substitution signal that arrives earlier than the eye test. When a rotation player's misses go short two possessions running, he is done, whatever his minutes total says and whatever he tells you when you ask, because players are famously terrible at reporting their own fatigue in a close game.

The obvious use is late in a game. The less obvious one is in a series, where the pattern across four games tells you whether a role player's legs are surviving the travel, and whether the shooting slump everyone is discussing is a slump at all or a workload problem that a few fewer minutes would fix.

Shooters get benched for missing. They should occasionally get rested for missing in a particular direction, which is a much more specific thing, and a fixable one.