Lakers: Three-Point Shooting Woes In Graph Form
Your 2022-23 Los Angeles Lakers are the worst three-point shooting team in the NBA, and it's not even particularly close.
Just how bad is this club, which should really be doing its darnedest to surround All-NBA small forward LeBron James and All-Star big man Anthony Davis with oodles of floor-spacing shooters?
Historically bad. Through three games, the 0-3 Lakers are making just 21.2% of their relatively high-volume 39 three-point attempts a night.
To illustrate just how rough this is, ESPN NBA analyst Kirk Goldsberry (a former San Antonio Spurs front office executive) created a graph to illustrate each NBA franchise's three-point shooting, with the horizontal axis measuring triple attempts per 100 possessions and the vertical one charting effective three-point percentage.
The Lakers rank dead last, by a mile, in conversion percentage. What mitigates that a little is the fact that they are at least getting up a bunch of trey attempts, albeit less-than-successfully.
Some players who are normally competent three-point shooters, most notably starters LeBron James and Patrick Beverley, have been performing below normal levels.
James, a 34.6% shooter on 4.5 attempts for his career, is making just 25.9% of his 9.0 tries. Beverley is a career 37.7% three-point shooter on 4.2 tries a night, but this year so far he is connecting on just 21.4% of his 4.7 looks. Here's hoping their output stabilizes. As two of the team's "better" shooters (a generous phrase for a club with no truly elite shooting), Los Angeles certainly needs LBJ and Pat Bev to step up from deep.
Russell Westbrook is chucking an unreasonably robust four long-range looks per night. But he's made just 8.3% of them! Given that Russ's output beyond the arc seems to be depreciating every year, it may behoove him to just cut triples out of his shot diet entirely.
