What 36,599 of my own shots taught me

made, of 33,910 threes logged

58.5%

made, of 2,468 free throws

79.8%

threes in a row, my longest run

17

threes in one session, November 2017

815

My three falls off at about 150 bpm

Tally Hoops records my heart rate with every shot I log on Apple Watch, so 13,827 of my threes carry one. From 100 to 149 bpm my make rate barely moves: about 61%. From 150 to 159 it slips to 57.1%, and at 160 and up it's 51.6%, 9.2 points below where I am when I'm fresh.

My threes by heart rate when I logged them

Heart rate (bpm)	Made	Shots
100–109 bpm	71.5%	186 shots
110–119 bpm	61.2%	1,267 shots
120–129 bpm	60.9%	2,992 shots
130–139 bpm	60.9%	2,832 shots
140–149 bpm	59.9%	2,914 shots
150–159 bpm	57.1%	1,718 shots
160–169 bpm	51.1%	1,551 shots
170+ bpm	53.7%	367 shots

That drop is what Tally Hoops calls my Fatigue Cliff: the heart rate where my shooting falls off. (The 170+ band is small, 367 shots, so I don't read much into its slight rebound.) Yours will sit somewhere else, which is the point of measuring it rather than guessing.

Long sessions didn't wear my shot down

You'd expect the second half of a session to be worse. Mine isn't: across 230 three-point sessions I made 58.8% in the first half and 58.3% in the second. In my 187 sessions of 100 shots or more, my first 25 run higher, at 63.8%, partly because every session starts on the two makes that end my warm-up. After that I hold at about 58% all the way to shot 100.

The first 100 threes of my 100-shot sessions, in groups of 25

Shots	Made	Shots
Shots 1–25	63.8%	4,675 shots
Shots 26–50	57.1%	4,675 shots
Shots 51–75	57.8%	4,675 shots
Shots 76–100	57.9%	4,675 shots

So it isn't the number of shots that costs me. It's how hard my heart is working when I take them. That points to two ways to train: keep the shots that matter below my cliff, or shoot above it on purpose so the gap closes.

The hot hand is real, but small

After three makes in a row, I made 60.2% of my next threes. After three misses in a row, 56.0%. Overall I'm at 58.5%. A single make or miss moves it less: 59.1% after a make, 57.2% after a miss. With thousands of shots behind each number, a 4.2-point gap is very unlikely to be luck.

My next three, after what came before it

After	Made	Shots
3 misses	56.0%	2,590 shots
A miss	57.2%	14,005 shots
A make	59.1%	19,658 shots
3 makes	60.2%	6,810 shots

For decades the hot hand was filed under fallacy, after Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky's 1985 study concluded that streaks in basketball shooting were a misperception. In 2018, Joshua Miller and Adam Sanjurjo showed that the way those streaks were measured was biased against finding them, and that correcting it points to a modest hot hand. My numbers look like that: a few points, not a different shooter.

Year by year

In 2017, the first year I logged, 49.2% of my threes went in. By 2020 it was 61.5%. 2021 was a down year at 47.0%, and then I didn't log a session for four years. This year I'm back at 59.9%.

My threes, year by year

Year	Made	Shots
2017	49.2%	2,217 shots
2018	59.6%	15,158 shots
2019	61.3%	5,790 shots
2020	61.5%	2,266 shots
2021	47.0%	2,340 shots
2026	59.9%	6,122 shots

How these numbers were counted

• They come from my own export of every session (More › Settings › Backup & Export), taken on October 15, 2026 with Tally Hoops 3.11.
• Percentages are for three-pointers unless they say otherwise. Sessions under 10 shots, Workout Only sessions and a test session of a new feature are left out.
• Every logged shot counts. I warm up before I start logging and begin a session once I've made two in a row, so a session's first two shots are almost always makes. Leaving them out moves the numbers above by about a point at most, apart from the first 25 shots of a long session.
• Heart rate is what my Apple Watch read when I logged each shot. Sessions logged on iPhone don't have one.
• This is one player's data: mine. It's a record of my shooting, not a study, and your numbers will be different.

Checked against Tally Hoops 3.11 on October 14, 2026.