The Avenues to Starter Value for Subpar Shooters
An in-depth examination of the paths to NBA success for players 6'8" and under who struggle from long range.
“…if he shoots it.”
This is my least favorite sentence in the NBA Draft space. The statement carries so much weight that I can feel it pressing on my chest. That uncertainty leads to anxiety for me as an evaluator. If we could simply know, or at least feel better about an outcome, this job would be so much easier. But alas, it isn’t. For me, on a personal level, the stakes may be lower. I can say, “I got that wrong,” and the only consequences are a few people goofing on me on Twitter. But for NBA front offices, the stakes are exceptionally high. Draft capital cannot be re-attained, and they don’t get “givesies backsies” on negative value contracts.
The, “if he shoots it” statement is a tree with several questions branching off from it. Does it matter if the player can’t shoot? Can he have a good career as a subpar shooter? Can the player survive on low volume? Can the player make a leap and become a positive shooter? And most importantly, how the hell can we know if any of those avenues are attainable? In a class where so many wing and guard prospects struggled with their outside shot, I’ve been asking myself these questions again and again about a multitude of players.
The name of the game in scouting is always projection. What is a player going to be, and what does that value proposition look like relative to where you are drafting. For teams picking in the lottery, they are hoping to obtain players with starter value. “Starter value” can look different to different people. There are some guys who start that wouldn’t on other teams, and other teams may have bench players that would start in most other situations. For the purpose of this exercise, I took the Top 150 players in the NBA via BPM this past season. There wasn’t going to be a perfect methodology, but this was simple, and I feel that BPM is one of the best publicly available “all in one” metrics. Then, I trimmed out everyone 6’9” and above, since shooting is typically a less significant part of the equation for those players. The initial purpose is to get an idea of how many wing and guard type players can return starter value while being a sub-36% three-point shooter. We’ll dig deeper from there.