Haldi wrote:Its amazing to me how many people are calling out the OP here, and saying “of course we don’t do this and know that Curry is a better 3 pt shooter”, yet when it comes to comparing Lebron to older players in 3 pt shooting, all that goes out the window. I wrote a long post about this a few weeks ago and got laughed at for saying Lebron is a much better 3 pt shooter than Bird ever was. A couple games after that post, Lebron led a 20 point comeback against the Clippers that included 6 3pt shots in the 4th quarter, all of which except for one wide open shot, were well contested/off the dribble/step backs. Basically a bunch of shots we’ve never seen Bird even attempt, let alone hit, let alone hit 6 of them in ONE quarter lol.
I keep seeing people here say things like, my eye test is good enough that i can evaluate these stats and still understand why Curry is better… yet when it comes to Bird, he would somehow be a top 3 or top 5 or top 10 3pt shooter today lol. The mental gymnastics you need to do for all that is impressive.
Truth is, if you can truly take in account the shot difficulty and most of all, the type of defense that is thrown at you, which I haven’t seen mentioned once here, and you leave all your bias against today’s players and favoritism for the good ole boys, you’d soon realize not only is Lebron is a much better 3pt shooter than Bird ever was… in fact, you’d have to go pretty far down the list of today’s best shooters to place Bird in the right spot. Bird had a couple feet of room before his defender pretty much every time he had the ball behind the 3pt line. Imagine defending Curry or Lebron like that lol.
It’s fascinating to me how much people want to keep claiming that players in the earlier years to mid years of the league were so much better than todays, I’ll never understand this, it’s mostly only in this sport. Imagine talking to a super fan of skateboarding (another very young sport) and them claiming Stacy Peralta is a much better skateboarder than todays top guys. There’s teenagers that are better than that guy ever was lol. And of course its a very different sport but the evolution evidence is the same. I saw a like 14 year kid on YouTube do a 1080 on a half pipe lol. That didn’t exist in the 80s…
Anyways, sorry to highjack your thread OP but it’s a really good thread btw, I completely agree with you and I can only hope that people are able to use that same thinking energy and transfer it their comparisons of older players too… but I doubt it.
I think what you're citing here is interesting, but some differences make it not a direct comparison because now we're delving into somewhat hypothetical, while what the OP listed is directly comparable data.
In seasons with 1.5+ attempts, Bird shot 38.9% or higher in 7/8 seasons and 40%+ in 6/8 seasons. Obviously it was a different time. Generally most teams can create open looks (catch and shoot corner three, transition, pick and pop, etc) up to 6-7 3PA for a guy like Bird who had excellent off ball screens and would be used as a screener and in movement, so one would expect that if it is strategized (like we do now) which means he's working on it, you wouldn't expect the percentages to go lower than the 40%+ range he shot on ~2-3 attempts. We already know Bird could come off movement and make shots effectively and we know he had range, so obviously we can envision that we have many options of how to generate good 3PT shots for him.
Obviously as we know, the fewer 3PA you take as a first option (below ~2-3 per game), generally the lower your 3PT% will be due to heaves, late clock, etc having a disproportionate impact on percentage as they become a larger amount of total attempts at lower amounts.
The affect of attempts on 3PA is not linear for first options, it is more likely to have a positive correlation to 3PA up to around 3 attempts, then stabilizes, then depending on the player, it will decrease at a certain point, probably around 7-8+ when you start taking a higher percentage of difficult ones to get that many up.
So there is some nuance, and we shouldn't look at the relationship of percentage to attempts as a directly linear one where more attempts = lower percentage. Initially it is opposite, then there's a threshold where it starts to reduce percentage, but that threshold is different for different players too.