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Yesterday, I blundered my way through a post about how very many free throws Charlotte missed last year.

My basic point was: Wow, if they could shoot better, they'd have won some more games!

Then John Hollinger made a nice addition to the post, saying essentially that if they'd shot the league average, you could expect they would have scored 86 more points, which, sprinkled around the season, probably would have won them three more games.

Inspired by Hollinger, TrueHoop reader Samuel actually went through every Bobcats game. He writes:

I went and downloaded the data from all the games the Bobcats played last season and calculated their hypothetical point output if they had made 75.5% of their free throws in each game.

What I found was that Hollinger was right (surprise, surprise).

But what I found interesting was that even though he normalized the additional points for the entire season and predicted their record based on what I suspect is a basketball version of Bill James' Pythagorean Theorem, when the numbers were crunched for each individual game, Hollinger's prediction pretty much still held true; the Bobcats would have won 2.5 more games than they did (two wins and a tie that would have gone on to overtime).

When studying the results, it's interesting to note that they didn't lose any more games (even when they shot over 75.5% they didn't lose any games when their FT% was normalized down); they just won two more and another would have tied. Of the two games they won, each of those games would have been decided by one point. I suppose if you picked and chose which games you could allocate those extra free throws made you may be able to finagle a better win/loss record with the same FT%, but hey, you can't get too selective, right?