Is the 2-for-1 possession good for the Celtics?

If you’ve watched any NBC Sports Boston broadcast over the past few seasons, you’ve probably heard the term “two-for-one.” That’s because color commentator and NBA champion, Brian Scalabrine, absolutely loves it.

The “two-for-one” is the concept of a team working to outshoot their opponent in the final 40 seconds of a quarter, by taking shots at specific points to manipulate the shot clock.

For example, the Celtics will fire up an attempt with roughly 32 seconds remaining in a period to force their opponent’s shot clock to expire with enough time left for Boston to get a second look with a decent amount of time remaining.

Scal loves this. It might be his favorite thing. Anytime that the Cs have the ball with an opportunity to go for a “two-for-one,” he’ll be sure to gleefully point it out to either play-by-play announcer Mike Gorman or Drew Carter.

As for me, someone who has never played basketball above the high-school level, but watches every single Celtics game, I feel the same way about the two-for-one as Kramer and Newman do about Keith Hernadez.

I despise it.

In theory, the idea of strategically timing your shots in order to get an advantage seems simple. There are plenty of times when it works out, like this:

In practice, it can be rough on the eyes. A lot of the time it looks like Boston’s players are more willing to settle for two mediocre shots rather than working to get the best look possible.

Here’s an example:

I got so sick of watching the Celtics seemingly fire up tough shot after tough shot that I decided to go back and watch every single one of their two-for-one chances.

Shoutout to thehighlow.io for making it easy for me to go in and find each and every one of the two-for-one sequences. I set the search to plays that happened with less than 40 seconds to go in each quarter and was able to find everything I needed.

My ultimate goal was to see if the two-for-one was actually worth all of the hassle that we see almost every game. To do so, there were several factors that I took into account.

I went game-to-game and logged the opponent, quarter, shot types for each attempt, shooters for each attempt, the openness of each attempt, the time at which each attempt was shot, whether the shots went in, whether the Celtics got a stop on defense, and lastly, whether they won, lost, or tied…