Rodney Stuckey is not suddenly a dead-eye shooter
By Ian Levy
Rodney Stuckey was fantastic for the Indiana Pacers last season, relatively speaking. He wasn’t an all-star or an MVP candidate but he was a reliable scorer and secondary ball-handler, gave consistent effort on defense and altogether provided much greater value than Indiana was probably expecting on his one-year, $1.3 million deal. The Pacers were impressed enough that Larry Bird wasted no time in listing re-signing Stuckey as an offseason priority, eventually landing him on a three-year $21 million contract.
A big piece of Stuckey’s surprising production last season was his consistent outside shooting. He attempted just 2 three-pointers per game, but made 39 percent — 26th in the league among players with at least 140 attempts. This was a fairly shocking outcome considering that in seven seasons with the Detroit Pistons Stuckey he made 182 of 677 three-pointers — 28.6 percent. To say this was an outlier season doesn’t even begin to capture the disparity — last season was the first time he’d ever made better than 32 percent of his threes.
Stuckey can be a positive contributor even if his three-point shooting regresses, but Indiana getting anything close to equal value for their $21 million probably requires him to stay respectable from the outside. This is especially true if they have plans to use him alongside Monta Ellis, another questionable outside shooter. The question is, why, seven years into his career, did he suddenly start knocking down three-pointers? And should we expect it to continue?
Neither question has a clear answer but the implications are not great.
Last season, Darryl Blackport did some analysis and concluded that it takes about 750 three-point attempts for a player’s three-point percentage to stabilize. Looking at any smaller sample of their attempts, a single season for example, is not providing a thoroughly accurate picture of their abilities. Stuckey has taken just 778 three-pointers across his entire career–141 of which came last season. Putting those numbers up against Blackport’s research implies that last season was something of a fluke and that his current career three-point percentage–30.5 percent–is a better mark of his actual shooting proficiency.
However, Blackport was not looking for a static measure of ability. That is to say, a player can improve either by practice or by role changes. It’s just that we can know for certain if it’s an actual improvement or a statistical fluke until we approach that 750 attempt mark. What we can say is that is there isn’t much evidence a role change was responsible for Stuckey’s sudden and dramatic improvement. The two most obvious factors which influence the “easiness” of a three-pointer are defender distance and whether the shot was taken off-the-dribble or catch-and-shoot. Using the NBA’s SportVU player tracking statistics we can measure those two factors for this three-point attempts in 2014/15 and compare with 2013/14[1. 2013/14 and 2014/15 are the only seasons for which SportVU data is available on the whole league.].
Stuckey took more off-the-dribble three-pointers with the Pacers, was open[1. Defender distance of four feet or greater] for a smaller percentage of his attempts, with a defender, on average, about six inches closer. Essentially, all those factors would normally point to a decline in three-point percentage. And yet, those variables led to dramatically improved results.
We are left with a player who had a fairly established tracking record of being a bad shooter, who then improved dramatically, in a relatively small sample, for no reasons that are obviously measurable. It’s possible that Stuckey had changed something in his form or approach that his improved his accuracy, but it seems highly unlikely that he comes close to repeating his outside shooting performance from last season.