Buddy Buckets: Putting Buddy Hield’s scoring ability in perspective
By Chris Stone
Oklahoma’s Buddy Hield was one of the top players in all of college basketball last season and largely for just one reason: his uncanny ability to put the ball in the basket. The 22-year old guard averaged 25.0 points per game for the Sooners, the second highest mark in the country behind Howard’s James Daniel. That makes him the first player to average 25.0 points or more per game in a major conference since current Chicago Bulls’ forward Doug McDermott accomplished the feat in 2013-14 during the realigned Big East’s first season.
What separates Hield, though, is his ability to maximize his usage with efficiency. The senior finished the season with a true shooting percentage of 66.5 percent, the highest mark in the 2016 draft class, according to DraftExpress’ stats database. He is also the only player in the Basketball-Reference database (dating back to 1993-94, minimum 10 games) to average 25.0 points per game while posting a true shooting percentage above 65.0 percent. The sharpshooting guard even managed to maintain that efficiency while taking 30.9 percent of his team’s shots when he was on the floor, one of the 50 highest marks in the nation. Simply put, Hield was unrivaled among the draft’s wing prospects when it came to putting points on the board.
The question now is whether or not Hield’s impressive scoring ability can translate at the next level. Despite the success of high-scoring college players like Steph Curry and Damian Lillard, history is not on Hield’s side. For every Curry or Lillard, there’s an Adam Morrison or Jimmer Fredette and certainly, nobody would argue that McDermott is setting the league ablaze. The stats project a similar sort of pessimism. According to work done by Jon Nichols, now the Cleveland Cavaliers’ Director of Analytics, points are one of the least likely numbers to translate from college to the NBA.
Despite the past struggles of similarly situated scorers, Buddy Buckets still finds himself in the top 10 of nearly every publicly available NBA draft big board. Why? For starters, he’s not Fredette, Morrison, or McDermott. The latter two players have struggled to find a role in the NBA because they lack the quickness to play the small forward spot. Similarly, Fredette has yet to find an appropriate position in part because at 6-3 he lacks the size to be a shooting guard, his natural position. Hield, on the other hand, measured a respectable 6-5 at the draft combine and is more athletic than he’s given credit for. He should fit nicely as an off-guard at the next level.
It is also unlikely that Hield will be asked to carry a similar scoring load in the NBA to start his career, instead finding a role as a floor spacing guard for whichever team drafts him. The good news is that collegiate three-point percentage tends to correlate well with NBA three-point percentage, according to Nichols’ research, so the 22-year old should still be able to help stretch the floor, draw defenders, and knock down outside shots at the next level.
Hield was the most successful scorer in college last season and his ability to do so efficiently while taking such a high percentage of his team’s shots, is why he’s an attractive prospect to NBA teams. He is excellent finding open space on the court and can hit shots both off the dribble or in catch and shoot spots. How Hield is able to translate his scoring at the next level and package it with other skills like defense will ultimately determine the longevity of his NBA career.