Picture you are ten years in the past. 2013 Blake Griffin is dominating on the pick-and-roll, jumping over cars and defenders (sorry not sorry Kendrick Perkins), and dominating in the paint. Imagine you’re given a glimpse into the future, and you see this:

Since AI deep-fakes are not a thing yet, you’d just assume this is some sort of black magic or bath salts-induced hallucination. But yes, Blake Griffin is a perimeter guy now. How things change.

Now, I could prattle on about mystery shooting development and leave you thinking “hey, anything is possible!”, but my brain cannot work that way. We need to at least narrow things down, via film and stats, to develop realistic shooting development comparisons for Jonathan Kuminga. So, let’s get into it.

Criteria

For this exercise, I picked out players with comparable frames, shot diets, and development arcs. They’re not perfect fits, but it’s the closest you can get to Kuminga’s profile. We will use Brandon Ingram, Jerami Grant, and Tobias Harris as examples here.

All of these guys have broken out into high-volume deep shooting near or above 40% at some point in their careers. I want to explore how each of these individuals got to an elite level of shooting, and how these factors could foretell a future for Jonathan Kuminga.

Tobias Harris

A one-and-done combo big (in the NCAA at least) coming out of Tennessee, Harris’ prospect profile didn’t scream “future elite shooter”. 36.6% from the midrange, 30% from deep, and 75% from the line is about as middling as it gets. Yet a 6’8″ frame and a baseline touch gives some hope, and though it took a while, Tobi arrived. Look at his shooting development in the first 4 years in the NBA:

Getting to 36.4% on solid volume isn’t the level of breakout you will see with some of these other players, but considering this was the prelude to elite shooting 2-3 seasons later, I’ll count it for our purposes.

A few things to consider: all of the shooting percentages are very steady, from both midrange spots and the line, but the three-pointers fluctuated between bad and below-average. As he scaled up in his role, he began adding far more three-point volume, going from a 14% three-point frequency to 25% by year 4. This increased confidence in his shot began to show; he didn’t take an unassisted three until getting out of Milwaukee and began showing his off-the-dribble game.

The 2013-14 season for Orlando was crucial for his development. Despite hitting only 25.4% of his threes, he took almost 10% of them off the dribble. Midrange and free-throw indicators remained stable, and this built into his year 4 breakout. The increased confidence led to volume, volume lead to production, and just like that Tobias Harris was a good NBA three-point shooter.

His journey was built on stability and slow-burn scaling. He didn’t abandon the productive parts of his game, instead choosing to slowly expand his range and follow the process, not the results. These days he’s incredibly well-rounded, using his shot gravity to do work in the midrange and having some of the best rim frequency/finishing seasons of his career.

The length of his journey, however, was far different than the others we will look at.

Jerami Grant

Talk about a breakout nobody saw coming.

A below-average free throw shooter at Syracuse with career 6/20 marks from deep and 33.3% in the midrange, there were very few reasons to think Jerami Grant would turn into a borderline elite shooter at the NBA level. Yet, we are here.

Grant went from a non-shooting off-ball 4 to a true on-ball scoring machine on the perimeter and in the midrange, completely transforming his offensive profile with the addition of these new perimeter skills. He jumped from a middling usage scorer to a 90th percentile-plus usage wing, taking tons more threes and midrange shots at far lower assisted rates. The development hasn’t stopped: Grant now boasts one of the quicker catch-and-release jumpers you’ll find in the league.

Compare that jumper to what you see in the video below, and you’ll see the technical strides he has made:

He tightened his base (which is more conducive to movement looks) and killed the dip in his release while becoming more efficient from deep, a difficult feat by itself. This allows Grant to add a wider array of shots to his diet with the same repeated mechanics: if your off-the-dribble or off-screen mechanics are the same as your standstill shots, it builds more consistency in the shot. Keep that on-the-fly shot tweaking in mind when we get to Jonathan Kuminga.

Grant is an interesting contrast to Tobias Harris in terms of building offensive layers. While Harris slowly expanded his game, adding to a strong rim-finishing game with midrange and later threes, Grant burst through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man. The shot arrived, and the rest fell into place as a result: foul drawing (89th percentile last year), unassisted rim looks, and tons of long midrange creation off the dribble. Now you have a 20+ PPG scorer for the last 3 seasons on 45/37/83 shooting splits.

Exploring scoring growth via shooting is an interesting case, and I like to look at different ways it shows itself. When projecting a player like Kuminga, that potential growth could be explosive (like Jerami) or slow-burn (like Tobias). It’s good to see how those indicators develop, and what could be construed as indicators for those growth patterns.

Now, let’s look at a more explicable example of shooting development: massive volume increase.

Brandon Ingram

Now, there are certainly some reasons that can explain this massive leap in shooting production. One is named Fred Vinson, the New Orleans shooting coach who has worked wonders, including a total overhaul of Lonzo Ball’s shooting (which also happened the same year as Ingram’s breakout). At the time Ingram was on the team, the Lakers were the only NBA team to not employ a shooting coach. Yes, the mighty Lakers forgot to work on the “shooting” aspect of the game up through 2019. What a shame.

Ironically, the team only hired a shooting coach the summer after trading Ingram and Ball to the Pelicans, and the hiree in question was one of Vinson’s underlings. Too little too late.

You can see the lack of a shooting development plan in Ingram’s shot profile. Despite the rough numbers from the line and from deep, he was always a player with touch and shooting indicators and the frame to work wonders with. Yet his three-point attempts actually decreased in his first 3 seasons, despite the Lakers not being very serious teams on the court. His shot development was completely adrift, aimless, just waiting for something to break.

And since Ingram was shipped to New Orleans, he transformed into one of the best perimeter shotmakers in the league.

Encouraged to shoot from deep instead of discouraged, Ingram quadrupled his three-point attempts from his last season in LA to his first in New Orleans. That is a ton of high-level reps that developed confidence and consistency, and he responded with his best overall shooting season. The Bingy striped 43% of his long twos, 39% of his threes, and jumped his free throw percentage from the high 60s to mid 80s.

The shot development from deep opened up the best part of his game in the midrange. In New Orleans, Ingram has been the premiere midrange shot taker of the league not named DeMar DeRozan: 61% of his total shot attempts last season came from these spots. Considering he also has crazy unassisted shot percentages, these are of the highest difficulty, and he manages to make them at a strong clip. Adding that three-pointer to his arsenal, albeit at low volume, has served to accentuate the best part of his scoring game.

Many other factors have gone into his overall scoring breakout, including a higher volume of on-ball reps and lack of competition for touches. Adding the three-point shot helped turn Ingram from a lanky potential-laden wing to a primary scoring option and perennial All-Star caliber player, and unlock the true strengths of his game. In terms of realistic needs for a guy like Jonathan Kuminga, this is the ideal outcome: adding enough of a strong perimeter shot to accentuate the true strengths of his offensive game.

Man of the Hour: Jonathan Kuminga

We’ve seen a range of shooting development outcomes now, and it’s time to do some projecting.

You’ll notice something in the shot diet right off the bat: lots more threes than midrange attempts. But when you look at the film on his midrange attempts, you see a lot of touch, handle, and confidence that translates to success. When he gets going to his right at the elbows, he has a really soft touch and great apex on his jumper from all angles:

It’s not a shot he is encouraged to take often, but one he could certainly add more to his diet if space is opened up by his threes down the road.

Not only have we seen an improvement from below-average to above-average shotmaking from deep, but Kuminga has drastically improved his form. This is one of the factors that led to Jerami Grant’s breakout: locking the elbow and speeding up the release without sacrificing efficiency. Kuminga has sped up his release compared to last year, but his percentages did not suffer. That’s a great sign of his preternatural touch, something largely necessary to long-term shooting development from multiple levels.

Just listen to Klay Thompson discuss it, a guy who knows a thing or two about shooting form:

What I have also enjoyed over his first two seasons is the commitment to work on his form and add new tweaks when necessary, something that was also of great benefit to Jerami Grant. He’s working on his feedback constantly, improving the speed, efficiency, and repetition of his form. Look at the second clip here and note the angle of his shooting elbow:

Now here is his free throw motion last year. Check out how tight that shooting elbow is to his body, but with the same speed and eye tracking:

If Kuminga is comfortable speeding up the work on his jumper like this, and seeing an uptick in his shooting results through that process, then we should be bullish on his future shooting ability.

He’s capable of sustaining strong shooting stretches already. Over the second half of the season, Joku hit 41% of his 2.5 attempts per game, and it correlated with strong midrange looks. This really helped to round out his offensive game, again much like Jerami Grant: his foul-drawing and 2-point % both went up over that stretch, as teams had to respect the shot and opened up his lightning-fast closeout attacks.

Concluding Thoughts

It becomes simple math once Kuminga has established himself as a strong “time and room” shooter. If you leave him wide open and he continues to make it, it’s time to play him closer. And the vast majority of defenders cannot keep him in front physically. As his handle-footwork combo continues to develop alongside his superior athleticism, this will play off his perimeter game, and you will find yourself looking at a well-rounded scoring wing sooner than later.

How he ultimately shapes his game in the future will be interesting if the shooting is real. Perhaps it simply serves as a way to keep the defense honest as he tries to relentlessly drive the paint. Maybe the midrange game comes around, and he cultivates a Harris/Grant-esque scoring profile. Heck, he could just be a great perimeter AND inside-the-arc talent like Ingram, only with the frame of a competition-winning bodybuilder instead of LeBron’s skeleton (no offense, Bingy). Now that’s a scary thought.

I’ll be closely watching Kuminga’s shooting development over the coming season, and we will begin to get a better idea of his future scoring profile based on the data gathered from this season. Maybe he will carve his own path in the wing-shooting development world. We can only sit back and watch.

The post Jonathan Kuminga, Future Shooter? appeared first on Swish Theory.

To see where the problems lie, I collected data the only way I know how: watching 1,298 threes across the past three seasons to look for trends, problem areas, or anything else that sticks out. But before we dig into the data, I’ll outline my methodology and some terms that will pop up throughout.

First, there are the types of misses I tracked. The primary three misses are the front rim, back rim, and side rim. Too short, too long, just off. In a general sense, a large number of front rim misses indicate not enough power generation. The back rim misses point towards overcompensation. Side rim misses are largely a question of pure accuracy,

When watching these shots, I broke them into four categories: set shots, movement, off-the-dribble (OTD), and running. Set shots are largely catch-and-shoot looks (C&S), but I chose to add shots where he settled his base for more than a half-second. This added some reload threes with long pauses to that mix because he was squared and still when attempting the shot.

Movement shots are when he’s moving either left or right while shooting, usually coming after a handoff or flare screen. They don’t involve any gather or reload dribbles, unlike (you guessed it) off-the-dribble shots. Any shot with 1+ dribble fell into this category, except for the half-second+ reloads I previously mentioned.

Lastly, we have the runners, where he’s running directly into the shot and makes no effort to slow his momentum. Get it? Got it? Good.

Now let’s get into it.

The Set Shot

This forms the largest share of his shots before and after the injury. 58% of the pre-injury shots I charted came as set shots, and 49% after. That dip is likely explained by the deterioration in roster quality and credible non-Steph spacing options. But what’s really interesting is how remarkably consistent he’s been regardless of the injuries.

When charting the set shots from his 2021-22 season, he got off to a brutal 3/25 start with 13 front-rim misses. Considering those were his first games in over 1,000 days, it makes sense that he was coming up short almost half the time. As he got his legs under him, the results really turned around, hitting 44.5% of the last 202 set shots all the way up through the postseason. He overcame the brutal start to hit 40.9% of set shot looks last year.

Funnily enough, his healthy 2018-19 season followed an eerily similar pattern. He had an identical 3/25 start and was stuck at 30% from deep after his first 100 looks. But over the last 320 shots, he striped a crisp 44.2%, ending up at exactly 40% for the year. Sound familiar?

(Yes, Klay took 420 set shots that season. I’m not making that up.)

In both seasons, he started off with a high proportion of front-rim misses, before evening out as the season went on. A higher number of back-rim misses after an initial slump shows it takes him some time to build a solid base, with or without injury concerns.

Out of his 54 set shots to begin this season, Klay has hit 16, which is just shy of 30%. Does this mean he’s automatically going to hit ~44.5% of his remaining shots down the stretch? Maybe. I’d certainly be willing to bet it’s well over his current 30% mark, and his full-season numbers creep back toward 40% on the whole. If he followed the same pattern pre-and-post injury, it might just be a trend.

I think this is the most explicable phenomenon, and Warriors coach Steve Kerr has provided the answer:

Movement Shots

This is where it begins to get interesting. Before the injury, 24% of Klay’s total threes came off movement. Post-injury, it has risen slightly to 26%, probably explained by the overall spacing around him or just simple statistical deviation. What’s really interesting is how he splits between going right and left.

Of his 177 pre-injury movement shots, 90 were going left, almost a 50/50 split. Post-injury, 93 of his 148 movement looks are going left, a 63% share. Is that a by-product of a new roster or a change in tendency? It’s hard to say without more data, but keep it in mind when we get to OTD shots.

What also interests me is the huge drop in efficacy. He hit 43% of his movement looks before the injury and sits at 31% after. To me, this has two explanations, one that can be seen and one that has to be assumed.

The assumed explanation is the nature of the injuries. Klay tore his right Achilles, which is crucial to forming a base in the leg when shooting. While going to his left off of movement, the right leg is his inside (plant) foot and is relied on for the majority of the strength and balance needed to get square to the basket. If he doesn’t have the same strength in that leg, a big drop makes sense.

Another interesting potential explanation is the change in his shooting base. Though he often changes his base on a shot-to-shot basis, it has been most prominently widened when going to his left.

What really tells me that the problems are coming from the right leg are his splits on movement shots going right. Traditionally he’s 2-3% better going to his right, but that figure has jumped over 5% post-injury. I think this is due to two important factors.

Opposite to the movement left looks, he uses his left leg as the plant foot on these. Though I can imagine it’s still difficult post-ACL injury, he can still generate power from that left Achilles at a normal rate. That has resulted in only a minor change in his shooting base after the injury, as you can see below:

Running Forward

These shots really serve to highlight two things: confidence and momentum.

Most of these runners come when Klay is really feeling himself, and it’s no surprise he shot 43.5% on these very difficult looks pre-injury. What really surprised me is that he hasn’t lost a step on those looks post-injury, hitting a scorching 56% of those attempts. Granted this is a small proportion of his looks (only 6% both pre-and-post), but considering none of his other shots with more than 20 attempts are over 38% post-injury, it certainly stands out.

I think this points to a similar phenomena we see with his righty movement looks. The increased momentum transfer really boosts his accuracy, and no shot involves more momentum than a sprint directly into a pull-up three.

The increased proportion of these shots coming as heat-checks certainly plays a role here, but there’s no denying the results. If you’re not convinced that a higher proportion of momentum is playing a role yet, let’s dig into the final category.

Off-The-Dribble Looks

This category produced by far the most drastic results I found.

Pre-injury, Klay was a killer when dribbling to his left. It gave him a great way to shield the shot from defenders and go against a defender’s instincts by going left instead of right. They were also shots he could hit at a high rate: he cashed 24 of the 52 dribble looks going left I charted, a 46.2% mark, which was the highest of any shot in his pre-injury bag. They also represented a large propostion of his OTD looks at 62.6%.

Post-injury, it’s a completely different story. Not only has he dropped down to 35.9% on those looks, but he’s favoring them more often; 73% of his OTD looks now come going left. What’s even more interesting is he hasn’t changed the base on those shots relative to the others.

Though this certainly points to that lack of strength in the right leg we saw with his movement looks, the proportion of total shots is what interests me the most. Before the injury, 7% of his threes were OTD left. Now, it’s at 14%. In that same time, his OTD right looks have only risen by 1%. He hasn’t even taken an OTD right shot this season. Is he leaning on a shot he’s most comfortable with as he tries to regain his previous form? It’s very possible.

The number of makes also points to the need for increased momentum. When dribbling to the right, he gets a similar amount of energy compared to his movement right shots, getting a little more of a power transfer. Though it represents a small proportion of his overall shots, and could certainly be skewed by sample size, his 10/19 figure on OTD right shots post-injury is worth noting when lumped into the aggregate (which we will get to soon).

Another figure I hesitate to mention because of SSS problems are the step-back looks. He’s never really been one for stepping back, and they represent only 2% of his looks both pre-and-post injury. But he was able to at least hit some with both his legs under him, making 5 of 13. Now, he’s 2/9 post-injury. This by itself is not a significant figure, but certainly follows the larger trends.

The Need for Speed

Outside of the set shots, you can break all these looks into two basic categories: positive and negative momentum shots. His off-the-dribble and movement shots going right would be considered positive momentum looks, along with the runners. OTD, movement left, and step-backs are all negative momentum shots. If you’ve been paying attention, you probably already guessed which one is stronger for him right now.

After the injury, he’s splashed 45.9% of his 111 positive momentum looks. The 180 negative momentum looks drop all the way down to 32.7%. That is a MASSIVE drop compared to his pre-injury self.

The old Klay took 151 positive momentum shots, hitting a crispy 44.3% of those looks. He also managed to hit 43.9% of his 155 negative momentum shots. Notice the split is almost 50/50 between the positive and negative and the near-identical efficiency. The post-injury proportion has risen to 63% being negative momentum shots.

These numbers more than anything point to my two biggest conclusions: he’s really favoring his shots going left out of comfort, and the efficacy of those shots has dropped severely. Meanwhile, his shots with positive momentum have stayed effective because he’s using the left leg as the plant foot instead of his right. His tendencies have changed to favor the left despite the drop in efficacy, but he’s more or less the same going to his right.

So, What Do We Do With This Info?

The set shot really doesn’t concern me. Both the data and the eye test point to a guy struggling to find his legs early in any given season regardless of injury status, and he will only get stronger and better as the season goes on. It would be nice if this roster could get him a larger proportion of set shots relative to motion shots, but that 50% mark is palatable going forward.

Change may be needed regarding his motion shots. Someone needs to get in his ear and tell Klay to lean more into those righty shots and take advantage of a stronger left plant leg. It would also behoove the coaching staff to call more actions that get him flowing towards the ball going right, like Chicago and motion strong actions instead of the flare screens and double drags that usually skew towards his left.

What is clear to me is that patience needs to be exercised, mostly by the fans. If you can temper your expectations and weather the early-season slump, the rewards will be fantastic. Don’t be doom-and-gloom in the early regular season while he tries to figure things out. He has a full year ahead of him to tinker, unlike last season.

My main conclusion? Don’t doubt Klay Thompson. Most players couldn’t even handle starting minutes after this injury, let alone have the confidence to still take their preferred shots, which in his case are very taxing on the lower body. He will figure out a way to be a great shooter by the end of the year; that much I am certain of.

The post What’s Up With Klay Thompson’s Shot? appeared first on Swish Theory.