Earlier today, John Clay of the Herald-Leader had an interesting statistical roundup of the shots per minute of various UK players from the last four years. It placed Terrence Jones at the top, averaging a shot every 2.13 minutes of play.

I decided to take that research a step further. Looking at the shots attempted per minute is a great thing to look at, but considering the comparison is between four different years (and two different coaches who played different styles), I tried to eliminate tempo from the equation. For example, Calipari’s first team took 2,298 shots, and Gillispie’s first team took 1566. So I decided to break down what percentage of the team’s shots a single player took. Mostly, this reinforced the original findings; certain players had varying degrees of importance to their team.

Jodie Meeks (easily) had the highest percentage of shots attempted on a single team, with almost 30 percent in his final year at UK (the year where it was basically Meeks and Patrick Patterson, and the year Meeks had the 54-point game). In terms of balance, this year isn’t too bad; five players take at least 10 percent of the team’s shots, and Jones’ 24 percent isn’t excessively high. Somewhat surprising was last year’s team, in which nobody took over 20 percent of the team’s shots.

Of course, this isn’t perfect, by any means. It doesn’t take into account free throws (since it doesn’t count as a field goal attempt if you miss and get fouled. For example, Wall and Cousins each got fouled about twice the amount Patterson and Bledsoe did, so taking that into account, Wall and Cousins were taking more shots than perhaps the % FG stat indicates). I couldn’t quite figure out how much to try and weight free throws into the equation, though I may tackle that here soon. And I might include possession percentage in this table soon, too, because there is (obviously) much more than just taking shots that goes into how much of a team’s offense a single player consumes.

Anyway, here’s the table. Let me know if there are any mistakes, or any other pertinent statistics that could (or should) be added to the discussion.

PLAYER	FG ATTEMPTS	PERCENTAGE
Jones	158	24.0 %
Knight	150	22.8 %
Lamb	99	15.1 %
Liggins	87	13.2 %
Miller	75	11.4 %
09-10 PLAYER	Out of 2228
Wall	438	19.7 %
Cousins	369	16.6 %
Patterson	374	16.8 %
Bledsoe	312	14.0 %
Miller	215	9.6 %
08-09 PLAYER	Out of 1938
Meeks	568	29.3 %
Patterson	398	20.5 %
Stevenson	198	10.2 %
Miller	160	8.3  %
07-08 PLAYER	Out of 1566
Crawford	401	25.6 %
Bradley	330	21.1 %
Patterson	282	18.0 %
Stevenson	120	7.7 %
Meeks	88	5.6 %