Lakers: Is The League Over The Concept Of Anthony Davis As A Jump Shooter?
Los Angeles Lakers All-Star Anthony Davis struggled through a variety of injuries, known and unknown to general fans, during L.A.'s ill-fated 33-49 2021-22 NBA season. AD appeared in just 40 contests, and revealed only this year that he had been shooting through a wrist injury from January through the end of the season. He had become one of the league's least efficient high-volume jump shooters from beyond the interior that season.
With the wrist injury supposedly behind him, all those shooting problems were also supposed to be behind him this year -- but has certainly not been the case thus far. Davis is connecting on just 20% of his 3.3 attempted triples per game through three games this year, a far cry from being a fairly solid long-range shooter from 2017-20. In terms of midrange jump shooting, Davis had made 0% of his looks from between 10 feet to the three-point line through his first two games.
It very much appears that the rest of the NBA, at least through L.A. first three games, is not taking the Brow particularly seriously outside of the painted area.
As beloved NBA Twitter personality Rob "World Wide Wob" Perez noted, Portland Trail Blazers center Jusuf Nurkic today wholly ignored Anthony Davis in the corner on this long-range jumper during the team's 106-104 matinee loss to Portland.
Portland also often put Nurkic "on" Russell Westbrook, who is such a bad jump shooter now that the 7' Trail Blazers big man was able to sag way off Brodie to patrol the paint and cut off Lakers drives to the rack.
L.A. would ultimately finish shooting a paltry 6-of-33 from deep today. For his part, Davis went just 0-of-3 from long range in the contest.
Here's hoping this is just a blip, and Davis will get closer to his 2017-20 self as a jump shooter.
