Nylon Calculus: What’s wrong with the Warriors’ shooting?
By Ian Levy
The Golden State Warriors had their strongest win of the season last night, beating the Portland Trail Blazers 127-104. However, the team hasn’t looked anything like the juggernaut the league feared when the added Kevin Durant this summer, and their woeful 3-point shooting has been the most glaring issue.
To date, the Warriors have made just 29.3 percent of 3s. The fact that this number still ranks 20th in the league speaks to just how messy things can be in a small sample at the beginning of the season. Still, it’s a shockingly low number for a team that arguably has the three best outside shooters in the league.
At a marco level, the problem has not really been about the quality of the shots they are getting. The Warriors 21.3 catch-and-shoot 3-pointers per game this season, about one less than they did last season. The problem is that they’re only making 29.4 percent of them, down from last season’s 42.9 percent, which led the league by a wide margin.
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The graph below shows all teams from this season and last, charted by their catch-and-shoot 3-point percentage and their catch-and-shoot 3-point attempts per game. You can see the Warriors’ slide pretty quickly.
I highlighted the Brooklyn Nets, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Dallas Mavericks, as another reminder of how the small sample size of a week’s worth of games can create outliers. Given that the Warriors are still getting a high number of catch-and-shoot opportunities, it seems absurd to expect them to continue shooting so poorly.
The culprits for the inaccuracy have pretty much been everyone besides Stephen Curry. Through four games, Klay Thompson, Kevin Durant, Draymond Green, Andre Iguodala, and Ian Clark are a combined 15-of-63 on catch-and-shoot 3s (23.8 percent). Thompson’s struggles have been the most obvious — he’s at 3-of-23 (13 percent) to date. He made 44.1 percent last season, seventh in the league among players with at least 200 catch-and-shoot 3-point attempts. He’s also missed all five of his pull-up three-point attempts.
If we assume that Thompson’s career 41.7 3-point percentage is an accurate and static representation of his skill, the odds of him making three or less 3-pointers on 28 generic attempts is about 0.03% (which is to say we would expect him to shoot that badly on 28 generic attempts about three times out of 10,000 trials). In simple terms, Thompson is struggling far more than we would ever expect.
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However, there is no obvious outside explanation for his troubles. Thompson is getting catch-and-shot looks. Of his 28 3-point attempts, 20 have come with the nearest defender at least four feet away, which the NBA classifies as open (or wide open if the defender is at least six feet away). In general, his shots haven’t gotten any harder, he has no reported injuries, and this doesn’t look like a chemistry issue with the addition of Kevin Durant. You can chalk this up to the mental pressure of needing to avenge last year’s Finals loss but the more likely scenario is that Thompson, and the Warriors, are just mired in a run of extraordinarily bad shooting luck.
Luck has a way of changing though.