Detroit Pistons: Complete NBA Draft guide to the 3-point shooters

Now that the Detroit Pistons are highly likely to select Cade Cunningham I wanted to start profiling player types that complement him starting with shooters. But, I am not just looking at any player that can knock down the occasional long-range shot, I want players that can consistently do it and at a high rate.

This is a category I like to call the LEGIT shooter. What do I mean by legit and why is it capitalized? Well not all three-point shooters are created equally and this is to try and separate them. First off, percentages can lie about a player’s capabilities as a shooter.

Case in point: player A takes 15 shots per game, and within those 15 shots every game they take only three attempts from beyond the arc and hits one of these three-point attempts every game. Player B only takes threes, averages nine attempts from downtown per game and hits three of those every game. Both players hit the same percentage at 33.3 percent, but player B is actually a shooter, spacing out the floor since that is what their primary skillset is.

Player B also needs to be accounted for by the opposing defense as a shooter since they are only taking threes and also hitting more of them than player A. This manifests itself in the three point attempt rate stat you will see in advanced stat lines which tells you the percentage of field goal attempts that are from three-point range. A LEGIT shooter to me is closer to player B as three point shooting is one of their primary shot types.

Detroit Pistons draft picks: How to find a LEGIT shooter in the NBA Draft

In addition to that, LEGIT shooters for me have to hit threes at a high enough rate to make the defense account for their abilities as a long range shooter. This is a little harder to nail down as it is a case-by-case basis, but I will give you an example of how I determine a “high enough rate.” In the 2016-17 NCAA season Donovan Mitchell posted 35.4 percent on his threes.

However, he took 6.6 attempts per game which translated to a 50.9 percent three-point attempt rate. So while he was sinking the shot at what is considered an average percentage, the defense still had to account for him as a shooter since those were a little over half of his attempts. Team context also plays a key role in determining a LEGIT shooter as well in my opinion and I use Mitchell to show this as well.

On Mitchell’s Louisville squad there were two other guys that posted percentages that seemed to show Mitchell wasn’t the only shooter on the team. Deng Adel recorded 34.6 percent and Quentin Snider was 37.3 percent from downtown. Yet when you look at the amount of three-point attempts each player took, Mitchell clearly separated himself as LEGIT as he took a total of 226 attempts from three whereas Deng managed 127 and Snider 150. Mitchell took 99 more attempts than the next best three-point shooter on his team.