re: Brandon Ingram shot selection through the years

I’m not saying there isn’t a potential coaching or strategy issue at play here, but let’s please consider the following before taking Shamit Dua’s analysis as the end all be all of why something might be happening.

1) Brandon Ingram almost had a career threatening injury before we traded for him

2) Ingram was not a good 3 point shooter before we traded for him

3) Alvin Gentry’s system is a variation of 7 seconds or less with ultimate offensive freedom

4) Lonzo Ball was our Point Guard. Jrue Holiday was also another solid Point type Guard

All of these things resulted in high 3 point attempts for Ingram. The guy was not on the scouting report as a 3 point shooter. Alvin Gentry gives everyone the green light to shoot early and often. Lonzo Ball and Jrue Holiday generated a ton of easy catch and shoot looks for Ingram. Zion also contributed to this during the games he played.

As years have gone by, teams now respect Ingram’s 3 point shooting ability and no longer leave him wide open for catch and shoot 3’s. Jrue and Lonzo have not been here for awhile to generate him these easy looks as well. Zion barely ever plays to generate him these looks. Ingram has also become more ball dominant/point guard esque. It’s tougher to shoot a spot up 3 in the corner if Jrue is in Milwaukee, Lonzo is in Chicago, Zion is in Portland, and Ingram is now the guy dribbling the ball up and initiating the offense.

Willie Green is not only a young head coach. He’s a young coach in general that has been tasked with keeping the team competitive while the roster’s best players are often injured.

Perhaps, our playbook would be deeper by now if CJ, Ingram and Zion had played more than 10 games with one another.

Willie Green is a good head coach. He’s honestly a winning head coach considering all the bs he’s had to deal with injury wise.

These are just some observations off of the top of my head. I can dive much deeper and talk about why Ingram’s shots at the rim percentage is down as well. But I think this is enough for one post.

Let’s just all please consider all the potential circumstances before we pile on Willie Green. It’s important to look at these things from a birds eye holistic view, not an inch away from your iphone screen on basketball reference view.

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Willie Green is a good head coach. He’s honestly a winning head coach considering all the bs he’s had to deal with injury wise.

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He has his strengths (great player's coach and culture) and his weaknesses (drawing up plays, particularly inbound plays) but he is objectively not a winning coach if we go off of career record. That is in large part due to injuries, but he is not a winning coach at this moment.

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Just b/c the shot from 0-3ft is the most efficient b/c you shoot it at 67% doesn't mean that's the only shot you take. You can't force up shots that aren't there, b/c when you do is when the efficiency goes down.

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No one is saying it's the only shot you should take.

You mentioned not forcing up shots, but THAT is the issue. Why are the amount of the most efficient shots (the 3 and at the rim) you can take going down for BI. You gotta at least ponder if that's a scheme thing.

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Is it better to take 4 shots at the rim a game and hit them at 65%, or 3 shots at the rim and hit them at 75% b/c you aren't forcing it?

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In theory, 4 at 65% unless that 4th shot you are taking has an eFG% of over 65%, which BI doesn't have any other shot with that level of efficiency.

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BI isn’t Tatum

He’s not as quick and not nearly as big and strong. Tatum probably has 20-25 lbs on BI. And he doesn’t get the calls that Tatum and other superstars get at the rim with regularity.

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He's definitely not Tatum, but that stark difference has a lot to do with mentality and approach as well.

Though I also think it's worth noting that BI and Tatum's fouls drawn are pretty similar, with BI actually coming out ahead in several categories. Tatum holds the edge on percentage of drives that end in a foul for example, 10.8% to 10%. Pretty close. BI holds the edge on iso/75 that ends in a foul, 5.2 to 4.7, also pretty close.

A lot of it just comes back to shot selection for me. Tatum's 3PTA rate is 43.5%, BI's is 22.5%. That has nothing to do with quickness or how big or strong you are. Per 75 possessions Tatum gets 5.7 shots at the rim, BI gets 3.2. Even something like using Tatum as the screen and roll man, 2 times per 75 possessions, BI is at 0.1. They even do a better job getting Tatum paint touches on cuts, posts, etc etc, 3.1 to 0.8 per 75.

Just a lot smarter offensive basketball going on over there in Boston, imo.

Those are all fair points but BI is good enough that he should always be an efficient scorer... Always.


We're not the only team with injuries. Injuries are bad enough but if rotating injuries means our max player whose best skillset is putting the ball in the basket can no longer do that with league average efficiency over that large of a sample size, I stand by my statement that it can only be 1 of 2 reasons: he's not as good of a scorer as we thought or as good as he once was, or we have a scheme problem that is forcing him to take less of the efficient shots and more of the inefficient shots.

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It’s wild. BI is taking the least efficient shots in basketball the most often and is still efficient.

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The issue is that he's actually not efficient at league average.

There's a weird scenario where you can be efficient from 3, efficient from midrange, and efficient at the rim and still be overall inefficient. BI seems to be living in that weird area.

The above is possible if you're taking too many of your shots from midrange, the least efficient shot in the game. Just because you're a good/efficient midrange shooter, no good midrange shooter makes them at clip good enough to ever be nearly as efficient as a good 3pt efficiency or at the rim efficiency.


Looking at it now, 15.8% of BI's shots come from 3-10 feet out and 18.6% from 10-16 feet out, so that's a total of 34.4%, a bit over 1/3rd of his shots. He shoots those 2 spots at 37.1% and 37%. When 1/3 of your shots are that inefficient, it's just hard or nearly impossible to overall efficient.

I've got a lot of concurrent thoughts on BI and his shot selection.

On the one hand, it can be frustrating cause based on snippets of things he's said, I think he sort of believes that analytically ideal shots are somewhat "beneath him" essentially. That being a guy coming off screens to take threes or just slashing to the rim are too boring and not high level enough to hold his interest. He wants to be like MJ/Kobe/KD and be known as a guy that can iso up and "cook" guys in complex ways.

On the other hand, there is something to say for that cause it seems in the playoffs it often comes down to teams that have guys that can score in those non-standard ways. Since defenses tend to do a much better job stifling things like attacks to the rim and disrupting three-pointers(unless your Curry). So guys with diverse and strong mid-range games suddenly can be difference-makers in a series. Like BI in the Suns series or later on CP3/Ayton getting whatever they wanted in the mid range.

That also said, when teams I think will be tempted to do given our lack of shooting, is dare us to beat them from 3 in the playoffs. I'm pretty sure a team will inevitably focus on disrupting BI in the midrange and building a wall against Zion and just daring the rest of the team to bomb 3's.

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Here you can kind of see where BI ranks in terms of 3pt attempts vs those other guys you mentioned.

His positioning on that graph is not where you want him to be.

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Love the scatter plots!


But yea, the 40.9% shooting from 3 for BI just isn't as meaningful when it's on lower attempts, with BI at 3.8

I'd take, say, 38% on 7 attempts any day over 41% on 3.8 attempts for a volume scorer like BI.

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I don't think he'll ever be a 7 attempt guy.

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He really should be though with Zion.

Frankly unless Zion learns to shoot, an ideal version of his pairing is not a BI taking 12-14 mostly iso mid-rangers it's BI taking 6-8 threes thanks to Zion collapsing defenses and kicking out. Then 8-10 of his usual stuff.

Which I know annoyed BI under Stan, but Stan wasn't wrong to an extent in using that dynamic. Willie just needs to find more ways of developing a 1-2 game with them and CJ.

I get the whole technically doesn’t have a winning record deal.

But I don’t know what coach would have a winning record considering the group we were rolling out there last year when we started 3-16.

To me, he’s a winning coach. He had the 3-16 stretch and the 10 game losing streak stretch. Other than that, If we are reasonably healthy. We seem to win 60-65% of our games and we seem to be capable of beating basically every team except Boston or Milwaukee.

It’s possible we need another X & O guy on the Staff. But it’s also possible we just need more continuity.

Larry Nance Jr for instance is a pretty smart guy/
cerebral nba player who has played for many coaches and with many high bbiq players such as Lebron, Kobe, Dame and he even still seems to really respect Willie’s coaching chops/bbiq based on some of his interviews over the past year.