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Do people still think Luka is a bad shooter?

Some folks used his 3PT % against him & call him a 'Bad shooter'.

But dude is raining 3's like crazy.

Yeah we should put more stock on 30 games over the rest of his career.

Bad?
No.
Streaky?
Definitely.

Some games he can't even hit FTs.

Primedeion wrote:Yeah we should put more stock on 30 games over the rest of his career.

I mean if he had same looks as some Mavs players like Grant Williams he would be 50% from 3PT line

The PHX defense, especially from the perimeter, is especially bad. Doncic isn't a great shooter but given time to set or against smaller players to defend, yeah, he's going to hit them with relative ease.

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Luka isn't what I would classify as a great shooter, but man, he always seems to hit the ones that break a teams back.

So in that sense he is, but overall, yeah, streaky.

He was never a bad shooter, his FT shooting was always the big letdown. He's picked up his shooting across the board this year though.

he's a clutch shooter
he could be having the worst game of the season but he's one of 3 players i want shooting the winning shot

Don't think he's a bad shooter, more streaky

Phoenix are **** defensively however, Booker is good, KD can play well, Okogie can defend very well, the rest of the team is trash

Streaky but if his shot becomes more consistent he would be insane

Only this year has Luka started taking spot up shots, until now it was mainly contested stepback which at 36% still pretty good, and enough to keep his defender close in case he wants to drive.

dirkules_41 wrote:He was never a bad shooter, his FT shooting was always the big letdown. He's picked up his shooting across the board this year though.

he was objectively a bad shooter for most of his young career. He was either at or below average (sometimes well below) as a 3pt and FT shooter from jump. I think he's just a hooper that doesn't really work on his body or his game. If he did, he could be an all-time great. But he parties hard in the offseason and just doesn't take his craft very seriously. And he's still able to be a top 10 player which is crazy

FarBeyondDriven wrote:

dirkules_41 wrote:He was never a bad shooter, his FT shooting was always the big letdown. He's picked up his shooting across the board this year though.

he was objectively a bad shooter for most of his young career. He was either at or below average (sometimes well below) as a 3pt and FT shooter from jump. I think he's just a hooper that doesn't really work on his body or his game. If he did, he could be an all-time great. But he parties hard in the offseason and just doesn't take his craft very seriously. And he's still able to be a top 10 player which is crazy

This is well on pace for dumbest comment of the night. Luka’s always been fine but disappointing from the free throw line but never bad. And his 3pt percentage has always been low but that because of his volume and shot chart. He never has an easy catch and shoot 3.

He has for sure not always come into camp at playing weight but that has been because of how he has done his offseasons in the past. He used to 1st train and get in shape, 2nd play for the national team, and then 3rd relax and vacation before camp where he would balloon up. He fixed that this offseason and hired a nutritionist.

We haven’t seen an explosion in new skills since coming into the nba but that is largely because he might have been the most complete rookie in NBA history, or at least offensively, and to say he’s added nothing just proves you don’t watch him or know nothing. He has always been a top 5 player since his sophomore season and now we’re watch him begin his prime where he is arguably jumping up to number 1.

He is a better shooter than his numbers might suggest based on the degree of difficulty on his attempts - he receives a lot of defensive attention and doubleteams and is rarely the beneficiary of somebody else on his team(maybe sometimes Kyrie?) or the Mavs offensive system creating open looks for him. He's creating most of his shots himself off the dribble with a high degree of difficulty.

That said I put him in the "shotmaker" category more than the "pure shooter" category.

He is an excellent shooter (nothing new) the difficulty of the shots he takes and his questionable form in the past were the problem and destroyed his percentages... also all of them created by himself

His shot selection always tanked his 3-point percentage. He's always taken more pull up 3s than anyone, and never taken any easy looks. (Over the past 3 years he's 100th percentile in pull-up 3 attempts, 11th percentile in catch & shoot attempts, 11th percentile in wide-open 3 attempts). He also never takes corner 3s. His percentages on all these shots paint him as solidly above average at pullups, and average at everything else. His free throw percentage is utterly average, which I'm not sure we've ever seen from such a daring shooter.

Obviously Luka does insane damage with his shooting, and defenses fear his shooting ability. Compared to the greatest shooters ever, Luka has giant holes on his resume. He's a bit enigmatic as a shooter, but massively impactful.

Maybe at some point in his career we'll see Luka in a less heliocentric offensive role, and have a better understanding of his overall shooting.

cupcakesnake wrote:His shot selection always tanked his 3-point percentage. He's always taken more pull up 3s than anyone, and never taken any easy looks. (Over the past 3 years he's 100th percentile in pull-up 3 attempts, 11th percentile in catch & shoot attempts, 11th percentile in wide-open 3 attempts). He also never takes corner 3s. His percentages on all these shots paint him as solidly above average at pullups, and average at everything else.

Yeah, people calling him a bad shooter are probably just glancing at his shooting splits. Like you said he takes a massive amount of the hardest shots in the game and they're almost all things he's creating fully himself. E.g. last year 90% of his jumpers were un-assisted (including almost 80% of his 3s). That's a nutty number. Another high-volume creator like Tatum for example shoots less than 50% of his jumpers un-assisted (and just 38% of his 850 3s last year were un-assisted).

The fact that he's creating average-ish offense off that huge amount of tough self-created shots makes him a pretty impressive shooter. Especially since the whole point of those tough shots is to set up his drives and passes. He definitely shoots well enough that you can't leave him alone and can't sleep on any of his moves, and shooting that well with a guy on his hip 30ft from the cup makes him much harder to guard or scheme against.

Have we reached the point in the thread where some Knicks fan wants to trade him for Julius Randle + Fournier?

39% of 10 attempts per game makes him one of the best shooters in the league if you consider the shots he takes.
When he is open he shoots at the same level as Curry when it comes to attempts and %. When it is tight he is below Durant and Thompson who is at 40%, but still on pair with George, Tatum, Duncan Robinson, and Porter Jr.

When it comes to 2-pointers he is at the level of Ingram and DeRozan when it comes to attempt and % when it is tight. He leads the league in open 2-point shots and his percentage is below average here, but we are talking maybe 1 or 2 percentage points.

Here you can play around with the stats:
https://www.nba.com/stats/players/shots-closest-defender-10?CloseDefDistRange=4-6+Feet+-+Open

remember that time Luka was averaging a higher 3 point percentage than FT rate in the playoffs