Since 1946 when the newly formed NBA played its first game, the Wall Street Journal estimates that more than four million shots have been made.
But of all those shots through all the years, the folks at the Journal say one was bigger than the rest — Kyrie Irving's on June 19, 2016.
We in Northeast Ohio are used to being on the wrong end of these surveys...
#OnlyInCleveland.
So we wondered: How was this shot better than the rest? What about Michael Jordan? John Paxson?
The Wall Street Journal applied existing analytics to look at two things: win probability and championship probability. How much did the shot increase the chances of winning the game and what was its impact on winning the title?
The Journal found what worked against those other iconic NBA Finals shots is, yes, they were title-winning shots but none were in Game 7.
Remember when Tyronn Lue called that timeout with a minute and 9 seconds left? Neither team had scored in like an hour and a half.
Alright, it was only 3.5 minutes. But it felt like an hour and a half!
Not only was the series tied at three and the game tied at 89 but the points for the entire series were tied 699-699.
You just can't make this stuff up.
So no shot in NBA history, they found, had a greater impact on deciding a championship than this one.
Though that's only in retrospect.
What made it no. 1 is the fact that Steph Curry missed this three pointer 20 seconds later or else we'd likely be talking about that as the greatest shot and we would have ignored this story in its entirety.
But he missed. We held. And Cleveland ended with a championship and a new play to define The Shot.
