Sane wrote:Thanks for showing half the midrange. The 10-16 is obviously midrange and after having a look Amen's sophomore season from 10-16 is best in the group (49%) which is very promising. His jumper is not awkward at all from midrange, he rises up pretty easily for those just needs a bit of repetition. His floater is exceptional.
You forgot to include Jimmy Butler who's only a hair better than Amen on those metrics.
Seems exaggerated to say this is some major obstacle.
Have you watched Amen Thompson shoot? It's ugly. it's painful. It's borderline unrepeatable. He reminds me of Ben Simmons when he attempts any sort of jump shot.
16-3PT is midrange for a guard that is coming off of pick and roll and getting perimeter isolations.
It excludes a lot of floaters and push shots. I was doing a short cursory look on basketball reference, not going deep into his numbers.
When a young player is developing, you don't care about percentages, you care about volume. The more volume a player puts in, the better off you can project actual ability.
Amen Thompson doesn't shoot at all from the midrange area compared to other young guards that had questionable jumpers.
Amen's jumper isn't questionable, it's non-existent. You are projecting something that doesn't fundamentally exist. He legitimately can't shoot, he doesn't have a simulacrum of a midrange game. Shooting 49 percent on 10-16 mostly push shots, floaters and baby jumpers don't mean anything.
We can look at a player that De'Aron Fox who had a shaky jumper coming into the league and by his second year he was shooting 37 percent on 3 attempts a game. Fox's rookie year, 20 percent of his shot attempts came from 16-3PT.
Most guards with shaky and broken jumpers, when developing their shot-creation ability, take a lot of shots from 16-3PT. They don't do short midrange shots. It makes sense, most defenses are going to give you 16-3PT, it's an open shot. It gives a young player practice with taking pullups and step-backs in space, going down hill.
Amen can't even shoot that and he's 22 year's old.
We can look at SGA who came in as a rookie and took 11 percent of his shots from 16-3PT and made 43.6%. So he had legitimate shot creation potential from the midrange. He also could only consistently hit from the corner 3s with his janky set shot as a rookie to the tune of 40.6%
Amen at least as shown the ability to hit corner 3s despite his lack of shooting prowess everywhere else.
Saying every single guard/forward that is athletic, with some ball-handling skills with a broken or non-existent jump shot, has a chance to get a shot just because they can hit a couple floaters and the occasional turnaround jumper when they have no evidence of being able to shoot, is wishful thinking.
I doubt Amen will turn into a consistent shooter. I think he'll basically be 6'6 Giannis at best, where eventually is able to hit wide open 16 foot jumpers that the defense gives up and the occasional turnaround jumper.
