The 2014-2015 NBA Season Thread. Lock It Up Please: The Golden State Warriors Are The Champions

[addict4sneakers]

Because nash was a god like shooter. He wasn't steve Kerr with handles. Nash shot just as well off of the bounce as anyone ever.

Nash had the hesitation pull jumper going both ways. :x

 

[pmatic]

So now Anthony Morrow is out for the first 4-6 weeks of the season. Not that he should be heavily counted on, but yeah.

 

[MVP]

Hard to say you're the greatest shooter when your career high FGA is 13 or 14. Gimme Ray or Steph any day.

 

[urbetterthenme]

Cp3 locked KD up bruh. No reason a 7 footer should be locked down by a basic size dude.

 

[pmatic]

Hard to say you're the greatest shooter when your career high FGA is 13 or 14. Gimme Ray or Steph any day.

I think a sample size of nearly 13,000 shots is enough to crown him the arguably greatest shooter ever.

 

[Vincent Van Goat]

 
Cp3 locked KD up bruh. No reason a 7 footer should be locked down by a basic size dude.

It'll take a lot for me to forgive both Brooks and KD for that. It was just... putrid.

 

[ballinsam23]

Shumpert making Derozan look like garbage out there

 

[ballinsam23]

double

 

[antidope]

Hard to say you're the greatest shooter when your career high FGA is 13 or 14. Gimme Ray or Steph any day.

Man you act like this is 3-5 years or something. We've seen more than a decade of shooting out of Nash

 

[mjsaver]

Dam Nash the greatest shooter ever ?

Hey whatever floats your boat but I feel like people are posting in the heat of the moment.

I'd be more inclined to believe it if this wasnt my first time hearing this stuff, dude basically retires and now he's the best shooter ever.

I've seriously never heard that about him before but Ray, Steph, Dirk, Bird and even Reggie have constantly been in that convo for years now.

 

[offset pow clow]

Shumpert making Derozan look like garbage out there

He is garbage

 

[pmatic]

Hollinger from 2010:

Greatest shooters ever

You'll often hear casual basketball fans lament the lack of shooting in today's game, especially from the free throw line. But actually, we have the opposite problem: The current NBA is littered with great shooters. In fact, several of the best shooters of all time are currently on NBA rosters, and most of them are more or less in their prime.

Without leaving the top half of the Western Conference standings, for instance, I can point out names like Steve Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, Peja Stojakovic, Kevin Martin and Chauncey Billups, all of whom have put together multiple seasons that rank among the best shooting performances in history. That's to say nothing of the other great shooters in the league -- Ray Allen, Jason Kapono, free throw-record holder Jose Calderon, Ben Gordon, Kyle Korver … the list goes on and on.

But which one is the best of the best? Aye, there's the rub. We've never had a clear metric for ranking the game's best shooters … well, at least until today's ill-advised endeavor. That's right -- we're going to try ranking the best shooters in the game's history.

First, a caveat: By "history," we're limiting ourselves to the 3-point era. There were plenty of great shooters who played prior to that point, but we have no way to verify their cases statistically. In particular, it appears Calvin Murphy and Rick Barry -- two players from the 1970s who were renowned for their shooting range and rank among the top six free throw shooters of all time -- are slighted by today's methodology. Bill Sharman, Mike Newlin and Fred Brown also get my apologies.

OK, now for the method. My first step is to require players pass through a couple of fairly low "gates" in at least one season: shooting 85 percent from the line with at least a 45 percent mark on 3s, or shooting 87.5 percent from the line with at least 42.5 percent made on 3s, or shooting 90 percent from the stripe with at least 40 percent made on 3s.

The point at this stage isn't to determine the best shooter of all time but to eliminate all the players we know darn well aren't the best shooter of all time. This does an efficient job, narrowing our list to 44 players.

From there, I set about creating a formula to rank the best shooters. I thought I'd have to dream up something very complex to adjust for all the variables involved, but it turned out a simple formula worked far better than any of my more exotic concoctions. I simply added a player's 2-point, 3-point and free throw percentages. We'll call this "Combined Shooting Rating," or CSR for short.

CSR works for a few reasons. First, the free throw is a pretty fair arbiter of shooting ability. It's the only true apples-to-apples measurement we have, because it's always 15 feet from the hoop and unguarded, regardless of what system the team runs or how the player is used. It's only one shot among many that need to be in a player's arsenal, but it's an important one.

Second, the yin and yang of 2-point and 3-point ability balance each other out. Some players are more effective midrange shooters than long-range marksmen, while others are more comfortable bombing away. And using this method makes the system more fair to players from the 1980s and early '90s, when teams didn't utilize the 3 as often or as effectively.

The one thing I left out was frequency. Obviously, players who pick their spots get higher-percentage looks than those who are the focal point of the offense on play after play. On the other hand, it's extremely difficult for players in the former group to shoot well enough from the line to crack the elite on this list, simply because of the lack of in-game repetition. Several snipers with great numbers from the floor (Brent Barry, for instance, or Hubert Davis) couldn't get into the top 10 because of free throw percentage, and even the second-ranked player on our list (one of the all-time snipers) has the worst free throw percentage of anybody in the top 10.

Also, I did set two minimum standards: 10,000 career minutes and 250 made 3-pointers. I didn't want anybody getting onto the list with a lengthy career sparsely populated with 3-point attempts; that seemed counter to the point of the exercise. While arbitrary, 250 nicely separated the truly deadly long-range shooters from the guys who merely hit midrange J's and made their free throws.

So now that our rather simple CSR method is clear, let's get to our list of the top 10 shooters, which also apparently doubles as a great predictor of post-career broadcasting, coaching and front-office opportunities. According to CSR, they are:

View media item 1231768

That's right: Steve Nash. By a mile.

I've always written that his shooting is his most underappreciated skill, but even so, this blows me away.

It makes sense, though -- run through the numbers, and Nash crushes every possible competitor. And it becomes even more impressive when one considers nearly all his shots from the field have come off the dribble. Nash and the fourth-ranked player on this list, Mark Price, are the only two players in history to shoot better than 50 percent on 2s, 40 percent on 3s and 90 percent from the line for their careers. And as it happens, Nash's general manager in Phoenix, Steve Kerr, is second on the list.

One strong point of this list is that it acknowledges a few of the game's great midrange shooters. Neither Chris Mullin nor Jeff Hornacek shot the 3 with great frequency, for instance, but both were deadly accurate when they did, and they were exceptional from 2-point range.

Fans of "Larry Legend" undoubtedly will be disappointed to see him eighth on this list and to see one player of his own size -- Stojakovic -- rank just ahead of him. But Bird's greatest asset was his ability to make high-difficulty shots, which would need to be part of a different list entirely -- a list that would include different players. (Kobe Bryant, for one obvious example, is nowhere close on the above list but would have to rank high on any list of tough-shot makers.)

If you're wondering about Nowitzki, he is 13th, and easily the best among players 6-foot-10 or taller. Players 11 to 20 on this list are Barry, Hersey Hawkins, Nowitzki, Davis, Korver, Mo Williams, Danny Ainge, Allan Houston, Scott Skiles and Glen Rice.

Before I exit, some players who didn't make my list warrant mentioning.

The first is Drazen Petrovic, who just missed my minutes cut-off because of his untimely death in 1993. Petro's rating of 1.799 would have put him fifth on the list, a fact that becomes even more impressive when one considers he was only 28 when he died -- most players improve their numbers on the above criteria well into their 30s.

The second is Calderon, who needs only 779 more minutes to crack the list; his 1.805 career mark would place him fifth. Calderon also has only 238 made 3s on his career and needs to make 12 more of those. You might think his free throw percentage carries him into the top 10, but actually it's his amazing 2-point field goal percentage that does it. Calderon has shot 53.4 percent for his career on 2-point shots, the best mark of any of the 44 players in this study.

Finally, two young players on the Golden State Warriors have established a great chance of finishing their careers near the top of this list. Rookie Stephen Curry is at 1.770 thus far in his brief career, and should that number hold up, he'll finish his career in the top 10. Since players' shooting often improves dramatically in their second through fifth seasons, he could finish as one of the top-ranked players of all time.

Then again, he also might finish second among current Warriors. Curry's teammate, Anthony Morrow, has played two NBA seasons as a part-time starter, and posted career marks of 48.8 percent on 2s, 45.9 percent on 3s and 87.6 percent from the line. That's good for a CSR of 1.822, which is better than every other player in history except Nash.

Obviously we're dealing with smaller sample sizes with those two, and it's possible they'll regress in future seasons. But when we discuss the great all-time shooters, those two are worth tracking in future seasons to see if they warrant a spot in the conversation.

Goldsberry from 2012:

A new look at the NBA's best shooters

Celtics coach Doc Rivers is credited with saying that “offense is spacing.” At the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Harvard researcher and Michigan State professor Kirk Goldsberry extended that logic to the whole game, explaining, “Basketball is a spatial sport.”

But when we compare shooters, it's important to note that field goal percentage is not a spatial statistic. It values shots from anywhere inside the 3-point line equally (as does the scoreboard). So while field goal percentage can tell us something about scoring, it doesn’t tell us much about shooting profiles. After all, who really thinks Tyson Chandler, the league leader by percentage, is really the game’s best shooter?

So who is?

Using spatial data mapping to track shooting, Goldsberry found that, in fact, Steve Nash is the game’s best shooter from the most places. To be more exact: Nash averages a point per shot (equal to 33 percent shooting on 3’s and 50 percent on 2’s) from more places than any other player.

As you can see in his CourtVision chart, Nash shoots just about every shot besides the baseline 2-pointer pretty well.

That might not shock people who read this 2010 story from John Hollinger that came to the same conclusion (Insider).

But if the information contained in the charts isn’t new, the presentation is. Indeed, what’s really great about these charts is that they address the constant theme of the entire conference: Data is great, but players and coaches need information they can easily understand and reliably use.

The enormous amount of data that goes into these charts can be instantly understood at a glance. It’s not hard to imagine a time in the near future when every coaching staff in the NBA will carry an iPad-like tablet on the sideline to instantly relate this kind of shooting tendency data to players.

Example: Each defender could get a map of where his man is most likely to make a shot in the last two minutes and a map of the other team’s collective shooting tendencies. With this information, the defenders could better force opposing offensive players to the places on the court from where they are the worst shooters.

The cliché is that a picture is worth 1,000 words. In a 20-second timeout, when valuable talking time is scarce, how much could coaches say with a picture worth 10,000 data points?

 

[rck3sactown]

Reggie Miller and Peja ranked ahead of Ray Allen and Bird 

 

[antidope]

Dam Nash the greatest shooter ever ?

Hey whatever floats your boat but I feel like people are posting in the heat of the moment.

I'd be more inclined to believe it if this wasnt my first time hearing this stuff, dude basically retires and now he's the best shooter ever.

I've seriously never heard that about him before but Ray, Steph, Dirk, Bird and even Reggie have constantly been in that convo for years now.

I know this isnt the first time I've made this claim. Steph Curry may surpass him(bias) but right now its Nash

 

[urbetterthenme]

LEbron and Shaq are better scorers than everyone on the list

 

[mjsaver]

Thanks for posting that P, now I see why y'all feel so confident in saying that.

Of course stat lovers treat hollingers word as gospel, like I said whatever floats your boat.

I'd take Ray and Steph over him tho and Dirk as well

 

[imlive365]

Klay wifed up that instagram thirst ****?

 

[lawdog1]

He is garbage

All-star players who make team USA aren't "garbage." Is he the next MJ or Kobe? No. Can he carry the Raptors to a championship? Probably not. But he's still a good player and far from garbage.

 

[Bert.]

Is it tuesday yet?

 

[offset pow clow]

All-star players who make team USA aren't "garbage." Is he the next MJ or Kobe? No. Can he carry the Raptors to a championship? Probably not. But he's still a good player and far from garbage.

He was an all star by default & was AD in 2012 status on that team usa squad

Hes aiight

 

[wavycrocket]

Yeah...Nash has been in that convo for some time. Y'all might scoff at his shot attempts...but he could get you 19ppg on like 12 fga on crazy percentages. He didn't get to the line much..but when he did...he made it count. When he shoots..he made it count.

Point is...Nash can shoot the blood out the ball from everywhere on the floor. And is in the convo for best shooter ever. Volume or not. KD, Dirk, Ray Allen, Mark Price, Larry Legend, Steph West and Jordan are in the convo as well.

 

[urbetterthenme]

Yeah...Nash has been in that convo for some time. Y'all might scoff at his shot attempts...but he could get you 19ppg on like 12 fga on crazy percentages. He didn't get to the line much..but when he did...he made it count. When he shoots..he made it count.

Point is...Nash can shoot the blood out the ball from everywhere on the floor. And is in the convo for best shooter ever. Volume or not. KD, Dirk, Ray Allen, Mark Price, Larry Legend, Steph West and Jordan are in the convo as well.

Jordan Nope

 

[urbetterthenme]

I TOLD YALL http://www.businessinsider.com/nba-coach-kobe-wizards-jordan-2014-10

 

[BIG LEEMELONE]

Just when I thought cp3 and blake couldn't be any lamer they go and make a sketch comedy show and totally embarass themselves

 

[julius wrek]

Watching the Heat @ Grizzlies game,

noticed that this halftime interview with Micky Arison has championship footage in which a certain individual has been edited/cropped out of altogether...