Here we go...

I have been thinking about writing this blog for quite a while. Ever since I started reading Allain Rhett's wired blog.  I really like the way that he thinks and explains things.   I kinda hope that I can get my readers to learn much like he helps his readers learn.  But mostly I think that he learns the most by making his blog and I think that I will do the same.  I have always heard that by teaching you learn the most so that is really why I am doing this.  I would like to stretch myself and learn more. I also don't think that anyone will ever read this so I am writing this mostly for myself.  Anyway here we go....

I have thought quite a bit about what I want my first post to be about and I wanted to combine a few of my passions.  So I am going to combine hard work, basketball and physics.  So naturally I am going to start with,  Stephen Curry.






         This video is of Stephen Curry hitting a dribble up three pointer in a game back in January.   Now this is probably not normal for a average person to be able to hit a shot like this but for him it is normal. Now I want to analysis this shot because it is one of his more normal shots and being a basketball player myself I want to know how Stephen Curry does it.

So if we take this shot and do some video analysis with it then we get these plots.

        The orange line above is the vertical position of the basket ball the blue line is the horizontal position.  As you can see the fit lines are also there and the equations.  The first term in the orange fit line should the half if the vertical acceleration of the basket ball. This number should be 4.9 meters per second.  As you can see it is not 4.9 but 4.92 meters per second which gives us about a 1 percent difference which I think is a difference that I can live with.

         The next thing that I noticed by doing this is that Stephen threw the ball with a horizontal velocity of 5.54 meters per second and it was in the air for 1.44 seconds.  If we times the horizontal velocity by the time you get 7.9 meters which is the distance that I calculated Curry must have been when he took the shot.  The three point line in the NBA is 23.75 feet away from the basket and it looks like curry took the shot from about 3-4 feet behind the line.  So 7.9 meters is about 26.16 feet so that all looks like it matches fairly close with my analysis. Now a basketball hoop is 0.46 m (18 inches) in diameter and a basketball is 0.23 m (9 inches).  So in order to make a shot you really have a little less than a 0.23 m (9 inch) window for the center of the ball to go through. The shot Curry took probably didn't go thought the exact middle of the hoop but lets assume that it did. So if he was only 4.5 inches short or 4.5 inches long he would have missed the shot.  That is only a 1.4 percent change on the horizontal velocity.  I mean that is not much room for error.  So my question is how is he so consistent at making such a small error look so easy.

         Now this is obviously not a complete analysis of Stephen Curry's shooting ability or is it a complete analysis of this one shot. So I will be back to do some more analysis later to complete this blog post.

Tobin Giraud