Nylon Calculus: The forgotten genius of Ray Allen

Let’s pour one out for the purest shot the game has ever seen.

Ray Allen announced his retirement yesterday, and all of a sudden, arguably the NBA’s greatest shooter was officially gone from the game (all due respect to the rest of Stephen Curry’s career). When fans think of Allen, we tend to focus on the image of him unfurling his iconic jumper from deep as the world’s most deadly spot-up artist with the unimpeachable mechanics, the miracle shot that he delivered for the Heat in the 2013 NBA Finals.

But Allen was more than that; he was actually in many ways an archetype for the modern game’s ball-dominant gunners. As Tom Haberstroh pointed out on Twitter, Ray Allen in his Milwaukee Bucks/Seattle Supersonics days put up numbers that were more like Curry’s than Klay Thompson. Only Curry and Harden in today’s NBA have seasons with 25+ points/game, 8+ 3FG attempts/game, and 4+ assists/game, which is the type of line Allen put up a decade ago.

The rate-adjusted per-36 numbers aren’t as favorable for Ray Allen, but they still line up. Of all of the All-Star seasons in the 3-point era, there are only 19 player seasons with at least 6.5 3-point field goal attempts and at least 3.5 assists per 36 minutes. Steph Curry has three, James Harden has two, Damian Lillard has two, and the only other player with multiple seasons on that list is Allen.

While not quite at the assist levels of his pure point guard peers, Allen still compares very favorably with the balance of his offensive game. The fact that he was in that region as a supposedly “conventional” shooting guard years before the stylings of the modern game took shape speaks volumes. Of course, Curry’s game-breaking, unanimous MVP 2015-16 season sticks out as the outlier of all outliers, but that tends to happen when you’re redefining the geometry of the basketball court.

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Ray Allen was moving all around the court and even crashing the boards on offense, with his 2001-02 season ranking third in that short list of 19 for offensive rebounds at 1.2 ORB/36. Even supposedly more athletic or more versatile or bigger players like Kevin Durant and Paul George fell short of that mark. His usage percentage in 2006-07 was 29.5 percent. For reference, James Harden in his MVP runner up season had a usage percentage of 31.3 percent, so it’s not like Allen was just cherry picking opportunities either. He was a focal point of the offense.

Two of today’s preeminent marksmen, J.J. Redick and Kyle Korver, have never registered a usage percentage greater than 23 in their careers. Not even Klay Thompson has come close to that mark. Neither did Reggie Miller.

Reggie Miller is the player most often compared to Ray Allen. This is a point corroborated by my player comparison model as well. Allen and Miller had remarkably similar statistical profiles and career arcs. However, there were some subtle differences between the two which set them apart. For one, Miller never hit the volume of 3-point shots that Allen was draining. He did make up for it though with more shots inside the arc, which naturally led to more free throw attempts. Ray Allen was a little more active outside of scoring, topping Reggie in rebounds per 36, assists per 36, and steals per 36, lending more credence to Allen as an all-around player, not simply history’s retroactively remembered one-trick sharpshooter (albeit a really good trick).

As far as their career arcs, based on Box Plus-Minus, Allen and Miller both followed very similar trajectories for the most part, with a few key differences. Allen’s BPM topped out at 5.6 in his fifth season. Reggie never finished with a BPM higher than 5. However, the tail end of Miller’s career was a lot stronger than that of Ray Allen. Unlike Reggie, Ray Allen’s last two seasons were spent at the end of the bench as a ring-chasing mercenary for the Heat. Of course, it was also that same stint which produced the most memorable clutch shot in NBA Finals history, so go figure.

“To me, he’s the greatest shooter ever because of his longevity. He did it year to year and got up on his shot. That’s what made him different,” mused Steph Curry upon news of Ray Allen’s retirement. Far be it from me to disagree with the guy who will likely end up taking over Allen’s crown, but perhaps what made Jesus Shuttlesworth so different was not simply his shooting prowess. It was a subtler, refined all-around game in his heyday that tends to go unappreciated, that when combined with his shooting gifts, set the stage for an era and a style of play in which the stars of today can chase Ray Allen’s ghost (probably around a series of staggered screens).