One of the defining characteristics of real basketball stars, and even great role players, is how well they perform under immense mental pressure. In this paper, we present a method to identify high-pressure situations during a basketball game through shooting success. In order to calculate the amount of pressure a team is facing going into a game, we use a prediction model to determine the importance of the given game for that team to reach their end-of-season goal. The model relies on features referring to game context, recent form, and pre-season aspirations. We then investigate the impact of our pre-game pressure metric, along with other factors, on the shooting performance of NBA players on six seasons` worth of data. We find that shotmaking in the NBA is mainly impacted by the so-called momentum, i.e., when a team outscores their opponent significantly over a short period of time.
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