Impacien wrote:Your approach is way too conservative to be functional. Your assessment of a young player long-range shooting potential would be limited to very few guys. You don't have opinions on how college freshmen project as shooters?
One can look at the evolution, even with small subsamples, at the mechanics and its consistency, at the misses, if they're going left and right and by how far to form an opinion.
Well, fact is that 3 point shooting varies highly, and I think that the reason is simply that the sample size is too small. I can't remember where the study was, but 3P% was one of the least predictive stats for college players. Plenty of guys who can't shoot have a good year and fool you (Rodney Stuckey was a 38% 3 point shooter his freshman year on 120+ shots, but never broke 30% after that), and plenty of guys who did not shoot well in college become excellent shooters. It's very hard to predict with accuracy how well a guy can shoot unless you're dealing with large sample sizes, or smaller sample sizes that are extreme in one direction. If a guy has only taken 100 3s, but hit over 40%, then obviously I'm going to say that he can shoot, while if a guy is shooting sub-30% I basically always assume that he can't shoot.
I suppose that I should back track. Even on guys with small samples size, I draw conclusions and have opinions. Naturally part of it is how good they look shooting the ball. However, I always have a little caveat in for these conclusions - they aren't totally reliable.
However, I'm pretty lucky, and in this draft class there are tons of prospects who shot enough 3's to have some idea of how well they can actually shoot. Certainly, a problem with my sort of analysis is that I basically don't assume guys are making large improvements either during the season or in-between seasons, but I guess it's just good to be cautious. Too many guys just can't really shoot, so I often er on that side.
Impacien wrote:Jokic is a big guy who, unlike most guards, only started shooting 3s recently. He's good form on set shots and his efficiency has been steadily increasing. There are good reasons to believe he'll eventually become a solid 3pt shooter, even though he's far from one now.
Unfortunately for Jokic, his feet speed doesn't project nearly as well. He's very slow (even his technical gestures tend to be executed in a slow, deliberate, way) and a tad soft as well. His body needs a lot of work for him to have a chance of becoming a NBA player.
Yeah, I've been watching some videos of this guy and he clearly needs to hit the weights, but given how effective he is you'd think that there'd be a little more hype for a center with his passing and feel for the game. Even if he's too slow to be a good defender, you'd think that he'd be able to get on the floor with his offensive game, especially if he does become a solid 3 point shooter. Given how big a thing stretch 4s are these day's, I figured that any big who shows a hint of shooting ability would be getting lots of love (like Isaiah Austin, who's terrible).
