BRHornet45
03-13-2011, 07:47 PM
The most exclusive group for a shooter is the famed 50-40-90 club, reserved for those who hit 50 percent from the field, 40 percent from three-point range and 90 percent from the foul line. The full list of guys who have done that: Steve Nash (four times), Larry Bird (twice) and once apiece for Jose Calderon, Mark Price, Dirk Nowitzki, Reggie Miller and Steve Kerr.
While scanning box scores, I noticed that Trevor Ariza went 0-of-10 in the Hornets’ thrilling win over the Mavs on Wednesday, an important victory in New Orleans’ push to clinch a playoff berth. I knew Ariza had been having a horrible shooting season, but I hadn’t checked his numbers in a couple of weeks, and his 0-of-10 line prompted me to do so now.
The carnage: 38.8 percent from the field; 29.6 percent from deep; 70.7 percent from the foul line. I joked on Twitter that if Ariza got hot, perhaps he could join the 40-30-70 club this season. Just for fun, I decided to look at how many players had actually shot this poorly over the course of a full season, with a floor for minutes played and three-point attempts in order to knock out guys who put up bizarre numbers in limited minutes.
And guess what? Ariza is having one of the worst shooting seasons in the three-point era (which started in 1979-80). Granted, he doesn’t shoot as often, particularly from long range, as a few of the other guys whose names pop up here, so he’s not doing as much damage to his team’s offense by gunning. And Ariza is, most of the time, a fantastic defensive player who defends his guy well, helps in smart ways and grabs steals.
But in any case, here is the complete list of guys (minimum 2,500 minutes and 250 three-point attempts) who have pulled off the sub-40 percent/sub-30 percent double (via Basketball-Reference’s indispensable database):
• Vernon Maxwell, with Houston in 1993-94: 38.9 percent from the floor; 29.8 percent from three.
• Jason Kidd, with Dallas in 1994-95: 38.5; 27.2.
• Mookie Blaylock, with Atlanta in 1997-98: 39.2; 26.9.
• Jason Williams, with Sacramento in 1999-2000: 37.3; 28.7.
• Jerry Stackhouse, with Detroit in 2001-02: 39.7; 28.7.
• Allen Iverson, with Philadelphia in 2001-02: 39.8; 29.1.
That’s right: Not a single Antoine Walker appearance!
Iverson obviously took the most shots of all these guys, but for my money, Jason Williams might be the most irresponsible chucker here. For him to jack 505 (!) three-pointers on a team that featured Chris Webber, Vlade Divac and a 22-year-old Peja Stojakovic (about 24 minutes per game in 74 games that season) … yikes. Someone needed to shoot for both Iverson’s Philly team and Stackhouse’s Pistons club; Maxwell at least improved a bit in the playoffs from three-point range in that championship season for Houston; Kidd was a rookie on a bad (but improving) team; and I just can’t stay mad at Mookie Blaylock.
Ah, but we haven’t yet factored in free-throw shooting, another area where Ariza (66.5 percent for his career) doesn’t exactly stand out.
The full list of guys who have pulled the sub-40/sub-30/sub-70 trifecta in a minimum of 2,500 minutes (but no floor for three-point attempts):
• Jason Kidd, 1994-95: 38.5/27.2/69.8
That’s it. That’s the whole list. That’s the club Ariza is a handful of missed free throws away from joining.
In related news, Ariza will make more than $21 million combined for the three seasons after this one for a team that traded away Darren Collison to get him and is currently owned by the NBA. As things stand now, it looks like Rockets general manager Daryl Morey did very well to get out from under the five-year deal he gave Ariza so quickly, even if he only received Courtney Lee in the four-team deal last August.
It’s easy to forget now, but Ariza’s shooting was one reason he got that contract in the first place. He shot 50 percent from the floor and nearly 48 percent from three-point range during the 2008-09 playoffs for the Lakers, and he looked ready to assume a role as a sort of super-duper Bruce Bowen. Morey is a ridiculously smart guy, so he surely knew that Ariza, a career 31.5 percent shooter from deep, wasn’t going to morph into a reliable 40 percent three-point shooter in the long term. But with Ariza just entering his mid-20s, it seemed reasonable to expect him to settle in as a decent shooter — maybe 45 percent overall, 35 percent from deep — and an elite, ball-hawking defender.
That obviously hasn’t happened, and as wonderful as Ariza is defensively, he’s only hurting his team by attempting 10 shots a game and making only three or four of them — especially since he’s just so-so at rebounding, passing and taking care of the ball, and he’s getting to the line fewer times per minute than at any point in his career.
Maybe I’ve still got the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on my mind, but all of this makes me appreciate how hard it remains even for the brightest guys to predict how well a player will perform in a new team context. Ariza looked good playing in the triangle offense alongside two of the world’s best players and some other wonderful pieces. Morey and then Dell Demps, the Hornets’ GM, surely used whatever tools they had (and Morey’s got a lot of mathematical tools) to try to predict how Ariza would perform with their teams.
In Morey’s defense, those calculations may have at least factored in Yao Ming. Still: These guys wouldn’t have made such large commitments to Ariza if they thought he would shoot like this. This is a poor two-year shooting run of historical proportions.
http://nba-point-forward.si.com/2011/03/10/is-trevor-ariza-the-worst-shooter-ever/#more-6460
While scanning box scores, I noticed that Trevor Ariza went 0-of-10 in the Hornets’ thrilling win over the Mavs on Wednesday, an important victory in New Orleans’ push to clinch a playoff berth. I knew Ariza had been having a horrible shooting season, but I hadn’t checked his numbers in a couple of weeks, and his 0-of-10 line prompted me to do so now.
The carnage: 38.8 percent from the field; 29.6 percent from deep; 70.7 percent from the foul line. I joked on Twitter that if Ariza got hot, perhaps he could join the 40-30-70 club this season. Just for fun, I decided to look at how many players had actually shot this poorly over the course of a full season, with a floor for minutes played and three-point attempts in order to knock out guys who put up bizarre numbers in limited minutes.
And guess what? Ariza is having one of the worst shooting seasons in the three-point era (which started in 1979-80). Granted, he doesn’t shoot as often, particularly from long range, as a few of the other guys whose names pop up here, so he’s not doing as much damage to his team’s offense by gunning. And Ariza is, most of the time, a fantastic defensive player who defends his guy well, helps in smart ways and grabs steals.
But in any case, here is the complete list of guys (minimum 2,500 minutes and 250 three-point attempts) who have pulled off the sub-40 percent/sub-30 percent double (via Basketball-Reference’s indispensable database):
• Vernon Maxwell, with Houston in 1993-94: 38.9 percent from the floor; 29.8 percent from three.
• Jason Kidd, with Dallas in 1994-95: 38.5; 27.2.
• Mookie Blaylock, with Atlanta in 1997-98: 39.2; 26.9.
• Jason Williams, with Sacramento in 1999-2000: 37.3; 28.7.
• Jerry Stackhouse, with Detroit in 2001-02: 39.7; 28.7.
• Allen Iverson, with Philadelphia in 2001-02: 39.8; 29.1.
That’s right: Not a single Antoine Walker appearance!
Iverson obviously took the most shots of all these guys, but for my money, Jason Williams might be the most irresponsible chucker here. For him to jack 505 (!) three-pointers on a team that featured Chris Webber, Vlade Divac and a 22-year-old Peja Stojakovic (about 24 minutes per game in 74 games that season) … yikes. Someone needed to shoot for both Iverson’s Philly team and Stackhouse’s Pistons club; Maxwell at least improved a bit in the playoffs from three-point range in that championship season for Houston; Kidd was a rookie on a bad (but improving) team; and I just can’t stay mad at Mookie Blaylock.
Ah, but we haven’t yet factored in free-throw shooting, another area where Ariza (66.5 percent for his career) doesn’t exactly stand out.
The full list of guys who have pulled the sub-40/sub-30/sub-70 trifecta in a minimum of 2,500 minutes (but no floor for three-point attempts):
• Jason Kidd, 1994-95: 38.5/27.2/69.8
That’s it. That’s the whole list. That’s the club Ariza is a handful of missed free throws away from joining.
In related news, Ariza will make more than $21 million combined for the three seasons after this one for a team that traded away Darren Collison to get him and is currently owned by the NBA. As things stand now, it looks like Rockets general manager Daryl Morey did very well to get out from under the five-year deal he gave Ariza so quickly, even if he only received Courtney Lee in the four-team deal last August.
It’s easy to forget now, but Ariza’s shooting was one reason he got that contract in the first place. He shot 50 percent from the floor and nearly 48 percent from three-point range during the 2008-09 playoffs for the Lakers, and he looked ready to assume a role as a sort of super-duper Bruce Bowen. Morey is a ridiculously smart guy, so he surely knew that Ariza, a career 31.5 percent shooter from deep, wasn’t going to morph into a reliable 40 percent three-point shooter in the long term. But with Ariza just entering his mid-20s, it seemed reasonable to expect him to settle in as a decent shooter — maybe 45 percent overall, 35 percent from deep — and an elite, ball-hawking defender.
That obviously hasn’t happened, and as wonderful as Ariza is defensively, he’s only hurting his team by attempting 10 shots a game and making only three or four of them — especially since he’s just so-so at rebounding, passing and taking care of the ball, and he’s getting to the line fewer times per minute than at any point in his career.
Maybe I’ve still got the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on my mind, but all of this makes me appreciate how hard it remains even for the brightest guys to predict how well a player will perform in a new team context. Ariza looked good playing in the triangle offense alongside two of the world’s best players and some other wonderful pieces. Morey and then Dell Demps, the Hornets’ GM, surely used whatever tools they had (and Morey’s got a lot of mathematical tools) to try to predict how Ariza would perform with their teams.
In Morey’s defense, those calculations may have at least factored in Yao Ming. Still: These guys wouldn’t have made such large commitments to Ariza if they thought he would shoot like this. This is a poor two-year shooting run of historical proportions.
http://nba-point-forward.si.com/2011/03/10/is-trevor-ariza-the-worst-shooter-ever/#more-6460