How one shot chart is scored against another, across every qualified season since 2000-01
Every field-goal attempt lands in one of twelve zones, and those zones are a complete partition of a player’s shots. That turns a season into two vectors: his shot diet, the share of attempts from each zone, and his accuracy relative to the league, his FG% in each zone minus what the whole league shot from that same zone that same season.
The league baseline is the part that does the work. A 45% mid-range season means something very different in 2003 than in 2025, and measuring each zone against its own era is what lets seasons twenty years apart sit next to each other honestly.
Similarity is one minus that distance, so 0.78 means two charts are 78% alike. Nothing reaches 1 — across 5,415 qualified seasons the closest match to a given year usually lands in the mid-to-high 0.70s.
Equal thirds looks neutral but is not: each part is already divided by a constant to reach 0–1, and those divisors do the real weighting whatever the headline split says. The default is defended by the one test available — a player should be most like himself. At 45 / 45 / 10, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s own 2023-24 and 2024-25 rank second and third against his 2025-26. At equal thirds his 2024-25 drops out of the top eight, not because he shoots differently but because he took 335 more shots. Removing volume entirely fails the other way, surfacing 700-attempt bigs as matches for a 1,300-attempt guard.
The tool offers all three so the choice can be checked rather than trusted.