How the Detroit Pistons are addressing last season’s 3-point shooting woes
Andre Drummond develops a 3-point shot
You all knew it was coming folks. The absolute best thing that can happen for the Pistons to improve their three point shooting and their team overall this upcoming season is for their star center Andre Drummond to develop a three point stroke.
Every off season, Drummond posts numerous videos of himself in the gym hoisting up 3-pointers.
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Some fans love it and are filled with excitement envisioning their franchise center knocking down spot up three’s in games. Other fans despise it, begging Drummond to ditch the three balls to work more on his post game and free throws (which Drummond hilariously acknowledged in one of his Instagram posts).
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To be the middle ground between the two viewpoints I will say that Drummond has been showing videos of him knocking down three’s in practice and during recreational games for a few offseasons now. It has become almost an inevitable occurrence that Drummond will tease us with these types of videos, but where are the results?
Last offseason gave us hope when Casey stated that Drummond will have the green light to shoot if defenses leave him wide open. Thinking back to Casey’s time with the Raptors he also did this with Jonas Valanciunas who started off his career as a traditional back-to-the-basket center, then improved to add the three ball to his game and is now shooting a respectable 35.7 percent from deep for his career.
Drummond developing a 3-point shot is a gamechanger. light. Related Story
Drummond opened up the first three months of the season attempting 25 three’s. Of those 25 he connected on only four of them. This caused Drummond to ditch the plan to shoot more three’s and stick to what he has traditionally done and keep most of his shots in the paint shooting only 13 three’s the remainder of the season and connecting on one. This put Drummond at a putrid 5/38 on his 3-pointers last season.
Drummond clearly has lots of work to do if he hopes to be hitting three’s with confidence this upcoming NBA season, but he appears to have the ability to do so.
Remember that just a few seasons ago Drummond was crowned the worst free throw shooter of all time when he connected on just 35.5 percent of his shots from the charity stripe, which is the current record for worst single-season free throw percentage of all time.
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The narrative that season was that it was imperative for Drummond to improve his free throws if he hoped to make a leap towards becoming a more dominant center in the league. Numerous articles stated that if he could ever get his free throw percentage to even 50 percent it would be a god send for the center’s effectiveness on the Pistons. Well, Drummond has done just that.
He went from being the worst free throw shooter of all-time to shooting 60 percent from the charity stripe in his last two seasons. While these are still not incredible percentages, as the league average from the free throw line last season was 76.6 percent, one has to admit it is impressive that Drummond could go from a guy who would constantly get forced out of games due to the “hack-a-Dre” strategy to a guy who NBA defenses now have to respect at the line.
Drummond has shown he can improve his shooting touch from the line which should give Pistons fans hope that he can do the same with his 3-point shooting.