Antoine Walker, once asked why he shot so many threes and responding with “because there are no fours,” is one of several players who I often wonder about how they’d be viewed if they played in today’s NBA. He wouldn’t stay on the floor for 42 minutes per game like during the peak of his career, but how much of a demotion would he have to take or would he play at all?
Simply put, efficiency matters more now than in the era of basketball Walker played in when, as Ian Levy wrote in his shooting profile of Allen Iverson’s MVP season: “quantity often obscured quality when it came to statistical achievements.” So it’s understandable if Walker, whose career also started and ended at a similar time as Iverson’s, would remain an example of a high-volume, low-efficiency scorer. One example is his 2001-02 campaign, arguably the peak of his “chucking”. Walker averaged 22.1 points per game that season, a fine number before looking at how he got there. He led the NBA in field goal attempts all while shooting just 39.4 percent from the field, only the second time the league-leader made under 40 percent of his shots in the shot clock era.[1. Paul Arizin was the other in 1955, the first year of the shot clock era.] 2002 was also the second of three straight seasons Walker led the league in three-point attempts, taking 1,830 treys from 2001 to 2003 all while his percentage from beyond the arc declined each of those years, from 36.7 to 34.4 to 32.3.[2. One other thing about Walker that’d be nuts if it happened today: 2002 was the second of three straight seasons Walker also logged over 40 minutes per game. He led the league in total minutes in 2002.]
A lot of that can be complimented with his shot chart from the 2001-02 season:
Walker hoisted threes from all over the arc and even the corners, somewhat unusual for a high-usage player. The arc actually doesn’t look as bad accuracy-wise as I thought it would, looking most respectable from the right wing. What’s also hard to ignore, though, is how poorly Walker shot around the rim. He always took a good deal of shots from there but his accuracy was never better than league-average. The same can be said for the mid-range game, where the shot chart shows blue dots save for some near the left block. This isn’t anything different from any other of Walker’s seasons. He shot anywhere from four to 15 percentage points worse from mid-range than the league-average.[3. From 1998 to 2008, Walker had five seasons where he didn’t shoot above average from any of the five shot locations on NBA.com: Restricted area, paint non-restricted area, mid-range, corner 3, and above the break 3. The seasons: 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008.]
About Walker’s mid-range attempts, though: There aren’t that many on that chart, and he was never a big shooter from there to begin with. Not once in Walker’s 12 seasons, even while he settled for more jumpers and got to the line less from 2000 and on, did he take as many mid-range attempts per 36 minutes as the player average.[4. In 2002, Walker averaged 2.82 mid-range attempts per 36 compared to the player average of 4.50.] He still took a decent amount of shots in the non-restricted area portion of the paint as you can see in the chart above, often around twice the player average per 36 minutes[5. In 2002, Walker averaged 2.31 paint-non restricted area attempts per 36 compared to the player average of 1.76.], but he was largely an around the rim-and-3s shooter.
That’s at least one part of Walker’s game that could fit with today’s NBA, though probably in a more reserved role. Below are percentages showing how much of his field goal attempts were taken from the restricted area and the arc compared to the player and team average each year:
Maybe there was some method in the madness of Walker’s “chucking”. The problem with his offense, as we saw in his 2002 shot chart, was that he was no Kevin Durant even if he could unlock that sort of range. Walker was largely an inaccurate to break-even shooter, something that would be scrutinized even more if his career started a decade later. On the flip side, maybe where he took (or didn’t take) his shots would be another part of his game worth discussing.
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