What’s Up With Danny Green’s Jumper?
This season, Danny Green has shot just 35-of-115 (30.4 percent) on three-pointers. Though it may take a while for three-point shooting to stabilize to a player’s actual skill level, it’s surprising that Green, who has been an incredibly consistent shooter over the past four seasons is struggling like this. Over that time, Green shot 43.6, 42.9, 41.5 and 41.8 percent from the three-point line. Assuming he keeps up his attempt rate for the remainder of this year, he’ll have to shoot around 44 percent to reach 40 percent on the season.
In the NBA, three-point shooting can very accurately be predicted through weighted coin tosses, and there isn’t really a difference between the results you get from that compared to what players actually shoot, given a certain skill level shooting. For example, here’s a chart of Curry’s 3-point shooting streaks compared to a math.random() function weighted to Curry’s shooting percentages.
On a separate note, this also hints at the quite well proven notion that it’s difficult to control how well opposing teams shoot threes– or to do so in a way where it can be extrapolated from the data over longer periods of time.
Green’s shooting woes can quite easily be explained away as an accident of happenstance. The probability of Green shooting 30.4 percent or worse on 115 attempts by a weighted coin toss (a sort of first quick test that is a relatively good indicator) is just 0.7 percent, given similar looks as he’s had in years past. At least one player is going to be that far off their previous numbers every season, but in Green’s case it’s very unlikely that he’s actually become a worse shooter than before, which is something that would typically explain upward trends. Life after all isn’t a coin toss.
Per Vantage Sports, 59.7 percent of Green’s jumpers were contested last season. This season that number is up to 65.0 percent[1. In Vantage data “contested” is defined as a defender is within 3 feet and having a hand up.]. The Spurs play two traditional bigs most of the time, and with the team trying to integrate LaMarcus Aldridge, it’s possible Green generally isn’t getting the same quality of looks as before. Further, 30.2 percent of Green’s three-pointers have come with 7 seconds or less on the shot clock, or with the shot clock off, and Green has only shot 5-of-28 (17.8 percent) in those situations.
For some reason, Green has hit only 1-of-16 (6.3 percent) from the top of the key. And having looked through those shots, there’s no reason for his misses at all.
Interestingly enough, of those 15 misses, 9 were discernibly short, and 2 were long misses. 5 of the misses were clearly to the right, while only 1 was to the left. From the left corner, of the 13 misses, 5 can be reasonably described as the “in-and-out”-variety, where the ball spun on the cylinder before coming out.
Green is a killer shooter in transition on pull-ups, and generally the only red flag with his shooting is the fact that most of his shots are coming late in the clock compared to previous years, and those late shots have generally been either contested or well beyond the 3-point line. Overall, it looks like beyond that there isn’t much to worry about with Green’s shooting.