NBA Hater Report: Wemby isn't a good shooter, and Anthony Edwards, KAT, is at the other end of the 3-point epidemic

Welcome to the NBA Hater Report: A breakdown of some of the players, teams and trends around the league that are drawing your ire. Unless you are a pessimist, proceed with caution.

1. Wemby is NOT a good shot (at the moment).

Victor Wembanyama entered the 2024-25 NBA season with outsized expectations, at least from the outside looking in, on his 20-year-old shoulders. I voted him Defensive Player of the Year and I am certainly not alone in this belief. Some have even gone so far as to say that he would already be an MVP-level player if he wasn't on a bad team that doesn't give him a real shot at the award.

The Spurs are three games into the season and it's time to slow down.

This isn't to say that Wembanyama isn't an exceptional talent, or that he won't be an MVP one day, or that he isn't already an extremely good player; Anthony Davis makes me think twice about who the league's actual best defensive player is, but no matter where Wembanyama ranks, it's pretty darn high.

Things look a little different offensively. The numbers are going to explode because overall he's pretty great. But there are holes.

In particular, let's look at Wembanyama's shooting prowess, which until now has been largely celebrated through the prism of potential and supported by players qualified “for his size”, but has never really lived up to the narrative.

According to Synergy, Wembanyama has missed 14 of his 18 3-point attempts and made just six of his 24 total jump shots in three games this season. Small sample? Naturally. But last year he made just 31% of his jump shots and just 33% of his 3s, even after the All-Star break when his numbers exploded across the board.

“Conditioning is not an excuse,” Wembanyama said of his poor shooting after a 5-for-18 performance in San Antonio’s season-opening loss to Dallas. “With the missed shots… it's just a matter of shooting in rhythm. That is the most important thing for me. I think I'm comfortable in any area of ​​the pitch to shoot, but at the same time when I'm not in rhythm, that's an area of ​​the floor that I'm going to miss.

On the fitness side, Wembanyam only played in two of Spurs' five pre-season games after a busy summer with the French national team at the Paris Olympics, where he led his country to a silver medal. However, it should be noted that he only shot 28% from 3 in Paris with the shorter FIBA ​​line.

Is Wemby tired from the lack of fast-paced action in the ten weeks leading up to the season? Or is he tired of the long summer that requires him? too much Action? Either way, the start of a new season can always be a scrap. Everyone gets their rhythm at different times and in different ways. But that doesn't just apply to this year either. Wembanyama was never a particularly good shooter.

What he has Considering his size, he's a particularly formidable shooter who can, and sometimes does, take shots that give the impression you're watching an alien. I'm thinking about the one-legged threesome at the Olympics. Faded. Deep 3s. Must-have pull-up sweaters in your bag. Things that 5'7″ guys shouldn't be able to do.

But so far it is this ability that has all too often led Wembanyama to believe that he should actually be taking these shots with some degree of regularity (six 3s per game so far) because he does do them every now and then. It appears Wemby has complete freedom to do whatever he wants from any spot on the pitch as he focuses on developing into an attacking player of choice through exploratory repetitions, and in fact the results are far from that as important as the experience of this phase.

We saw that he progressed quickly as a passer. He recognizes better and faster how he is being defended. But don't confuse his relatively large shooting with AktuaI shoot. The potential is great and we can all clearly imagine that, but in the end Wemby's jump shots just don't come close to league average. Until then, he will open the Hater Report season.

2. Enough with all 3-pointers

Staying on the shooting theme, only one team averaged 40 3-point attempts per game last season, the Boston Celtics, who fired 42.5 attempts per night. This season, the Celtics have increased that number to 50.3, and nine other teams are shooting more than 40 three-pointers per game.

We all get that, but it sucks to watch. Anthony Edwards, an electric power player and elite athlete the league has rarely seen, is transforming into Klay Thompson. Last year, Ant attempted 6.7 3s per game; This season he's taking 13. Edwards is one of seven players shooting at least 10 three-pointers per game. Last season only two players cracked this threshold.

In four games, 53 of Edwards' 90 shots came from behind the arc. That's a 58.9% attempt rate, a higher number than James Harden has ever recorded and, according to Cleaning the Glass, on par with the most extensive 3-point season of Stephen Curry's non-garbage-time career.

There are structural reasons for this. Minnesota lost elite spacer Karl-Anthony Towns (who we'll talk about in a moment) and replaced him with Julius Randle, a total non-spacer. With a tighter lineup, it will force Edwards to shoot more from the outside to some extent. That doesn't make it any more attractive for haters like me to watch.

Right now, Edwards is hitting 41.5%, so it's hard to hate this practice. But he was, at best, a league-average 3-point shooter throughout his career; 36.9% in 2022-23 is the best he has ever done.

Chances are this hot shootout won't continue. But even if that were the case, we lose the distinction between what used to be a more eclectic range of styles; Some guys shot 3s because they were uniquely good at it, while others stayed more in the middle range. A few big boys stepped beyond the arc and that made them different, but now the only thing that makes them different is whether they do it not 3s shoot.

Turning Anthony Edwards into Klay Thompson completely destroys everything that makes him unique. Nobody is unique. Jayson Tatum, Stephen Curry, Anthony Edwards, little boys, big boys, all the boys in between, all now only shoots 3s. Even if they're not particularly good at it. They shoot for 3 seconds in transition, 3 seconds for catching, and 3 seconds for dribbling. They shoot three-pointers that, until relatively recently, would have been frowned upon by any basketball coach in the world.

Where does it end? How long before the only shots anyone takes are almost exclusively 3-pointers? Again, we all understand the math, and 3-pointers are a lot of fun when they're just a portion of the shooting pie, a large portion at that. But they cannot be the whole thing. NBA games should not be a backyard game of HORSE. Unfortunately, it feels like it's getting closer to that every day.

3. KAT needs to… shoot more 3s!

Let's not get it twisted: I am in no way anti-3-pointer. Anyone who has ever played basketball with me can confirm this. What I am is anti all-shoots-3s. If you're good at it, you should shoot them, and Karl-Anthony Towns isn't just good at it, he is Great included.

Unlike the aforementioned Wembanyam, who needs the “size-for-his-size” credentials before he can even be considered a passable shooter, Towns, even at six feet tall, is a career 40 percent 3-point shooter . Heck, he made 66% of his threes this season. The problem is that he only manages six of them in three games.

In total, Towns only fired 28 shots of any kind. That's an average of 9.3 per game, compared to 15.3 last season in Minnesota. After Towns took just eight shots in a loss to Cleveland on Monday, Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson was to blame for failing to get his strong shooter more involved.

“It's up to me as a teammate to make sure we're all on the same page and everyone's eating,” Brunson said. “I have to get better at that. I have to adjust and see.” [Towns].”

It's good that Brunson takes on quarterback responsibility here, but Towns also needs to be a much more aggressive scorer. That's why the Knicks traded for him. Shooting three-pointers and being the second-leading scorer next to Brunson.

The Knicks are only a contender if Towns provides enough offensive improvement to counteract the defensive losses of Isaiah Hartenstein and currently Mitchell Robinson. Nine shots and two 3-pointers per game are simply not enough.