Field Goal Percentage
However, what field goal percentage doesn’t take into account is that there are a variety of different shots in the NBA. This is incredibly obvious, but not every shot is worth two points. You can shoot 3-pointers and also free throws. As such, making 40% of your shots if they’re primarily 3-pointers is much different than making 40% of your shots when they’re all two-pointers. The former will score a lot more points.
Thankfully, we now have stats like effective field goal percentage (eFG%), which adds the 3-point component to FG%, and also true-shooting percentage (TS%), which takes it a step further and accounts for all types of shots: two-pointers, 3-pointers, and free throws. The latter is the one I use the most, as it has the most data and is thus the most indicative of how good a player is on the offensive end, in all shooting areas.
The above statistics have been around for a long time now, so there’s a very high probability that you already know what they mean, which I think means this for me – because it’s such an engrained part of the NBA analytics community, if you see an NBA DFS article that references FG%, you should probably just click the “x” on your browser and move on. There are better stats than FG% and there’s really no reason that it should be a big part of your research.
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