Shooting fouls are fouls committed during a shooting attempt, so they have nothing to do with team fouls. Fouls in the bonus do not count as shooting fouls.

Basically, if the R^2s are less than 0.1, the coefficients of linear correlation should be around 0.3 or less. Depending on the number of observations, this may be statistically significant or merely a result of random variation.

By the way, the number of shooting fouls should increase during each quarter due to the accumulation of team fouls.

I don’t think I ever assumed causality. I just explained how there’s a correlation between time elapsed and the amount of attempts of certain shots. I’ve alluded to what could be real causes (defenses tightening up, teams being forced to make up large deficits at the end of games, etc.), but I’ve never tried to explain why exactly these trends are happening. Like I said at one point:

“As you can see, there’s a significant increase in attempts as the game goes on. We also see a very rapid increase at the end of the game. I won’t speculate as to why this happens, but it certainly is interesting.”

The R^2′s are obviously very low (we’re talking less than .1), but I’m ok with that. I wouldn’t dare try to predict how many three-pointers a team would take based on the time of the game. I’d much rather know the players, the coach, the situation of the game, etc. However, for example, there IS a significant positive linear relationship between three-point attempts and time elapsed at the .00000…01 level.

I personally didn’t draw the trendline (a computer did), but yes, there is obviously a ton of variability. The exact slope of the line to me isn’t important. What matters is that for at least two of the graphs (midrange shots and three-pointers) there appears to be a definite trend just by eyeballing the data.