Needless to say, he was not going to have the same scoring opportunities as a Clipper that he had as a Pacer. Now he plays for the team with arguably the NBA's best isolation scorer in Kawhi Leonard and pick-and-roll tandem in Lou Williams and Montrezl Harrell. Then he was the secondary ball-handler on a slightly better one. In 2017, Paul George was the best player on a middling team. But despite their massive overall growth in recent years, shooting from that far behind the arc remains something of an inefficiency. Curry will be back in the mix next season. He and Trae Young have basically lapped the field in terms of long shot attempts this season. Portland's offensive rebound rate drops from 26.8 percent to 25.2 when Lillard sits. There is even evidence to suggest that more of such shots turn into offensive rebounds. The extra space he now has allows him to comfortably step into those pull-up attempts:Įxtending one's range has a multitude of benefits. For only the second time since the data has been tracked, Lillard is shooting a higher percentage on pull-up 3s (40.1 percent) than catch-and-shoot attempts (38.2), per NBA.com. He ranks in the 96th percentile in terms of pick-and-roll efficiency by scoring 1.138 points per possession despite his absurd volume, and it's not hard to see why. Taking those longer shots has led to Lillard tying his career-best 3-point percentage at 39.4 while also leading to a new career-high 28.9 points per game. In 22 fewer games, he has taken the same amount of shots from between 27-29 feet as he did last season while taking 65 more shots from at least 30 feet out. Keep in mind that Lillard played 80 games last season and has suited up only 58 times so far this season. Just consider his 3-point shot attempts by distance last season compared to this season, per Basketball-Reference. Lillard's gravity was already formidable, and he's dialed it up to 11 this season.
Defenses have no choice but to play drop coverage against that pick-and-roll. Literally every Blazer except for Whiteside and Lillard is wide open on that play. It is the most deceptively simple play in all of basketball. In the interest of tracking those stylistic nuances, let's look at some of this season's best shooters, how they found their shots, and what those play types mean within the greater context of the league. There is no single track to the top of the NBA's shooting leaderboard, and the cream of the 2019-20 crop reflects that. It takes mere seconds to figure out how often a player puts the ball through the hoop, and those who do so frequently enough are lumped together as great shooters with little consideration given to where those shots actually come from. Shooting, in itself, is viewed as a "yes or no" question, and its numbers reflect that. Few statistics do less to elucidate what actually happens on the court than 3-point percentage.
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