Here’s the scenario: You’re a college basketball player and your team is down by one. You’ve got a trip to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament on the line, but the clock shows less than three seconds. After your teammate passes you the ball, you dribble twice, pump-fake the defender, and throw up a jumpshot that could win the game.

Now, do you shoot the ball straight at the rim or aim for the backboard? According to researchers at North Carolina State, you better try to bank it in.

After analyzing computer-generated 3-D simulations of more than 1 million basketball shots, a team led by NC State’s Larry Silverberg determined that, while it does vary, there are large, identifiable areas on the court where a bank shot can be up to 20 percent more successful than attempting a direct swish.

The findings, published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports, make several assumptions about the ball shooter, in order to keep the the results determined by the 3-D sims consistent. One was that the ball be released at a height of either six, seven, or eight feet off the floor — a fairly typical height, if perhaps a little conservative. Also, a regulation men’s basketball with a 29.5-inch circumference and 22-ounce weight was used in the sim. (Women’s basketball uses a ball that’s an inch smaller and two ounces lighter.) Finally, the ball rotated out of the shooter’s hands with a backspin of 3 Hz (three revolutions per second).

What they uncovered (shown here) was that areas on the wing — between the free-throw area (most of that inner rectangle) and the outermost three-point line — contained pockets (shown in the bottom-most graphic) where a bank shot was much more likely to go in than with a direct shot.

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