NBA Season Preview 2019-20: The pull-up 3 revolution
The NBA is undergoing a 3-point revolution, but the pull-up 3 revolution extends beyond James Harden. It’s a league-wide trend that’s here to stay.
The NBA has changed. The style of play has shifted beneath the feet of the league itself within a span of only six years. Basketball used to be played through the post, and then with the rock whirring around the perimeter via the spread pick-and-roll.
All that has changed. For many teams in the NBA, ball movement is dropping. Stationary teammates frequently watch a star guard create with the dribble, and finish a zero-pass possession with a difficult, deep shot, or else penetrate to create a 3 for a teammate. Offense within the NBA has become increasingly based on the pull-up 3 and the threats that it creates.
One of the results is a visual change, a difference in how the game looks to viewers and participants. Not all triples are created equal. Take a gander at the difference in how two 3-pointers look. First is a Stephen Curry triple that leverages the threat of his teammate, Kevin Durant, into an open jump shot. Even before Durant, this has been the appearance of many of Curry’s triples over the last handful of years. Second is a James Harden triple from last season. It uses no teammate and is simply the result of one cold scorer. These are different triples, and they are not replicable in the same way.
The pull-up revolution has coincided with the NBA’s 3-point revolution, but they are certainly separate phenomenons. Much of the 3-point revolution has been driven by catch-and-shoot jumpers, which are predicated on breaking down the defense prior to the shot attempt.
Increasingly, in this new age, that is no longer true. Here are total-league wide numbers over the past six years in the NBA. Note that the numbers start in 2013-14 because that’s when publicly available Second Spectrum visual tracking data begins.
Change has been driven largely by two individuals: Curry and Harden. Curry was the innovator, the creator of the modern offense predicated on the threat and actualization of the pull-up 3, while Harden has pushed the phenomenon beyond recognition. If Curry is Alexander Graham Bell, then Harden is Steve Jobs.
In 2015-16, the year of Curry’s unanimous MVP, he attempted 502 pull-up 3s. He shot an incredible 43.8 percent on those shots, giving him an expected points per possession (PPP) of 1.31 on such plays. For comparison, the Toronto Raptors, last year’s NBA champions, boasted an offensive PPP of 1.13.
Comparing one shot with an entire offense, including bench minutes, is apples and oranges; however, Curry’s efficiency is evidence of how one incredible weapon can bend the physics of the NBA court, as you can see here where the helper chooses to run Curry off the line rather than stay with the cutting Kevon Looney heading towards the rim. An entire offense can be based around this stuff.
No one has been able to mimic Curry’s blend of quantity and quantity since 2015-16. Since that year, however, Curry’s attempted pull-up 3s have dropped, partially because of the Warriors’ addition of another high-usage offensive star in Durant.
Over the last few seasons, Curry’s records, at least in terms of quantity, have been dwarfed by his competitors. James Harden fired 943 pull-up bombs last season, which is the current record. He shot 36.3 percent on such shots, good for a PPP of 1.09, which would have ranked 23rd among team efficiency last season. In other words, Harden’s pull-up 3s alone would have built an average offense, but his ability to draw fouls on step-back 3s, combined with that threat opening up easy shots for teammates, meant Houston actually finished with a PPP of 1.16, second in the league.
Harden is no Curry, but he took Curry’s creation to its next logical leap. Because of the Beard’s frequency shooting pull-ups and step-backs, the aesthetics of the game have altered. It looks more static, with fewer passes and less ball movement. Harden’s style is thus a lightning rod for controversy. But for Harden, it works; he put up inconceivable averages of 36.1 points and 7.5 assists per game last year.
These trends beg a question. How far can the pull-up 3 take the NBA? The answer, at least over the short-term, is that we definitely aren’t done pushing the boundaries yet. The pull-up 3 revolution is no longer driven by just Curry and Harden. Now there’s a variety of characters who populate that play.
Of the 26 players who attempted 200 or more pull-up 3s in 2018-19, two were rookies. That Luka Doncic and Trae Young were empowered to attempt such shots — considered heresy against basketball orthodoxy only a decade ago — shows how far the league has come. That they finished first and second in Rookie of the Year voting is far from coincidental.
Five other players with 200 or more attempted pull-up 3s — Jamal Murray, Devin Booker, Buddy Hield, Donovan Mitchell and D’Angelo Russell — were between their second or fourth seasons. In other words, an outsized proportion of the players driving the pull-up 3 revolution are young and improving, and they will likely be taking far more pull-up 3s in seasons to come. It’s likely that the first non-Harden to break the 1,000 attempted pull-up 3 barrier will come from this group of young gunslingers.
Another player who could threaten to reach that barrier is Harden’s new teammate, Russell Westbrook. Westbrook, along with Harden and Curry, is one of the few players to have launched 200 pull-up triples every year since 2014-15.
Westbrook, however, is alone in that he’s never even cracked the 35 percent barrier on such shots, frequently finishing with an accuracy below 30 percent.
Westbrook, Kyrie Irving or Curry himself could all see their pull-up attempts increase dramatically this season, whether it’s because they’re on 3-happy teams, or because they’ll handle the ball more this season due to departing teammates. Sophomores Collin Sexton and Kevin Huerter both attempted more than 100 pull-up 3s last year at over 37 percent accuracy, and both could see a leap in attempts this season. Rookie Darius Garland is a good bet to see the freedom in his shot selection allowed to Young and Doncic in 2018-19.
The upshot of this extensive list is that pull-up 3s are no longer reserved for the most elite shooters and ball-handlers in the league. In 2014-15, Harden, Curry and Damian Lillard attempted the most pull-up 3s in the league. An arguably lesser tier of guards in Kemba Walker, Doncic and D’Angelo Russell attempted more pull-up triples in 2018-19 than any of Harden, Curry or Lillard did in 2014-15. Things have changed, and they’ve changed quickly.
The pull-up 3 is a cheat code, an easy shortcut to a passable offense. It can’t be overemphasized enough how heretical were these shots even a small handful of years ago. Taking contested 3-pointers before the team even ran the offense — especially from the point guard position, which was predicated on involving teammates before oneself — was a cardinal sin that would have earned players a seat on the bench and an earful from the coach.
Alas, the NBA is a copycat’s league; the success of individuals like Curry and Harden, combined with an increasing comfort across the league with the 3-point shot in general, mean that many coaches now encourage the pull-up 3. And it’s not only reserved for All-Stars who’ve paid their dues. More players than ever are empowered to juice their team’s offense by launching bombs off the dribble.
It’s clear that the pull-up 3 revolution may have been sparked by visionaries like Curry, and pushed by players like Harden, but the brunt of the change has been borne by far more than a few lone souls. Individuals can start a revolution, but they need apostles.
Take, for example, Harden’s ridiculous, record-setting 943 attempts pull-up 3s in 2018-19. He alone attempted more pull-up 3s than any team in history, save the Rockets in 2016-17, 2017-18, and 2018-19, and the 2018-19 Brooklyn Nets. Even still, if you were to subtract Harden’s attempts from the season and pretend they never happened, 2018-19 would have still featured the most pull-up 3s in history, as well as the highest percentage of 3s that were pull-ups. Harden may be the most extreme example of the current trend line, but his outlier status does not alone drive the league’s numbers. The change is league-wide, and it’s here to stay.
But does attempting more pull-up 3s than opponents correlate with success in the NBA? That is more difficult to answer.
Let’s start with 2018-19. Fourteen teams attempted 700 or more pull-up 3s, and 16 teams attempted fewer. If attempting more pull-up 3s correlated with greater success, we would expect to see teams that played deep into the playoffs to be among the 14 teams that shot more pull-ups. But we didn’t see that. Among the final eight teams, three attempted fewer than 700 pull-up 3s, including the eventual champion Toronto Raptors.
Since 2013-14, four franchises have won championships. The Golden State Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers never finished lower than seventh in attempted pull-up 3s in their title years. However, the Raptors and San Antonio Spurs were 17th and 30th, respectively, in their title years. The Rockets have set a new record for most team-wide attempted pull-up 3s every year since 2016-17, yet they’ve failed to win a championship over that stretch. It’s not clear that increased pull-up triple frequency helps a team win more games in the playoffs.
One of the explanations for this lack of correlation is as simple as it gets: It’s less important to take a whole whack of pull-up 3s than to make the ones you do launch at the rim. On one hand, duh. On the other hand, if the pull-up 3 revolution helps explain the context of NBA offenses since 2013-14, the lack of obvious correlation between shot frequency and team success helps explain results within that context.
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With that in mind, Harden may be shattering the sound barrier when it comes to frequency, but he’s never come close to equaling the accuracy of his counterpart in Curry. That’s one reason why the Warriors have won three champions since 2013-14 and the Rockets have zero.
The pull-up 3 may be redefining the NBA, but it may not have changed the black box forces that inform who wins and who loses. Even in this crazy era of the pull-up 3, don’t be fooled by the fluff. There could well be multiple players launching 1,000 pull-up 3s a season within the next few years. But it’ll be the ones knocking them down at record-breaking rates who win games in the playoffs.