Guess I'm looking for a bright spot on the dark side of the moon.

The trend is true for all players, but the curve will look a lot different based on the player. With Hoiberg for instance, you would expect him to have roughly the same percentage up to a certain threshold since most of his shots were long jumpers or 3-pointers. Beyond that threshold, you would expect his percentage to dip significantly since he would now be forced way out of his comfort zone. For a player like KG, you would expect the dropoff to be more linear since he would essentially be taking harder versions of shots that he was already taking. Hopefully some of this makes sense.

This is also the reason that some players are capable of carrying a team while others are not. When a player starts to bare a heavier load, his percentage will go down. Some players can do this with only a minor drop off, while others will suffer a more significant fall. Those that can't carry a team will still frequently make very good players, but they'll always need other players to take a bigger part of the burden.

In college hockey, on a team-by-team basis, I once found an inverse relationship between shots allowed on goal and save percentage.

My theory is that allowing a lot of shots is a signal of a poor defense (or a strong opponents' offense), which indicates to us that a team who allows a lot of shots is going to allow, on average, shots that are harder for the goalie to stop. Using that relationship could allow you to make an adjustment to the goalie's save percentage which would help to neutralize a bit the effects of playing on teams with defenses of different ability and in conferences with different levels of offensive prowess. (In particular, the WCHA and CCHA goalies generally had somewhat lower save percentages than Hockey East and ECAC goalies, but I think a good bit of this had more to do with WCHA and CCHA forwards possessing more ability to score than HE and ECAC forwards. As a result, everyone talked about how great HE and ECAC goalies were, when I think their guady stats had more to do with the conferences they played in than the quality of the goalies.) [/digression]

Comparing baseball salaries to the basketball salaries, the NBA winds up doing a better job at keeping away extreme outliers like the Rays and the Yankees, but there is still a pretty big spread in salaries amongst NBA teams. (For instance, the Mavs are probably spending more than the Hawks and Bobcats combined when you include luxury tax payments.)

I guess my point is that all of this salary matching in trades isn't actually keeping some teams from spending a lot more money than other teams, so why not just let everyone make trades with salaries that don't match, but tax the crap out of them if they want to spend a lot of money?

At the beginning of the 03-04 season, I lamented the fact that KG was shooting such a high percentage from the field and noted that this meant he was probably passing on some good shots that he could have taken to get the ball to his teammates.

(Points Per Shot)/2

SBG pointed out another logistical problem with trading Smith. He's only making $650,000 this season. Because of the salary cap rules, this makes it really hard to get value for him. We'd probably have to package him with someone else and do a 2 for 1, which might hurt our chances.

Question: is the average TS% different for starters than it is for bench players?

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that McHale will be his normal retarded self and not consider such a possibility.