Wednesday 24 April 2019 12:09, UK
Sharpshooting Golden State Warriors guard Klay Thompson has changed gears to hit peak form at the right time, having played through an early season three-point slump, writes Sky Sports NBA analyst Mark Deeks.
Though they are defending the NBA title they won last season and going for their fourth championship in five years, the Golden State Warriors are not the regular season juggernaut that they once were. After all, this is the team that won an NBA regular season record 73 games, even before adding Kevin Durant. This year's 53-24 mark is relatively sedate.
There is definitely an inattentiveness to the regular season that hangs over these Warriors, especially in the final few games. In their last 15 contests, for example, the Warriors have beaten the Philadelphia 76ers, Boston Celtics (by 33 points), Houston Rockets, Oklahoma City Thunder (in a likely preview of their first-round match-up), and the Denver Nuggets (twice); yet, they also lost to the Orlando Magic, Miami Heat, Detroit Pistons, Minnesota Timberwolves, Dallas Mavericks (by 35 points), and Phoenix Suns.
The Warriors can change gear and still be the best, yet they cannot, and do not coast like they once did.
Notwithstanding this, however, changing gear at the right time is a key point of having a regular season with so many games. And luckily for the Warriors, shooting guard Klay Thompson is doing so too.
Thompson started this season in a profound shooting slump. The player with the NBA single-game record for made three-pointers at 14 - and who has pushed back the boundaries on how clinical and effective an off-ball shooter can be - began the season hitting only 31.3 per cent of his three-pointers in the month of October.
Indeed, this slump continued for the remainder of the 2018 calendar year. Thompson improved slightly to a 36.6 per cent mark in November - good for almost anyone else, but not up to the standards he has set himself - yet dropped back down again to 33.7 per cent in December.
By New Year's Day, then, the league's best off-ball shooter had hit only 95 of his 276 three-point attempts, good only for a 34.4 per cent success rate - a number that paled in comparison to his 42.0 per cent career mark, the 44.0 per cent he shot last year, and the fact that he had shot at least 40 per cent from outside in each of his seven prior NBA seasons.
Shooting is fickle, however. Even the greats go through slumps; what makes them great is the way that they come through them. Abiding by the old adage that shooters keep shooting, Thompson was no less aggressive to open 2019, still shooting more than eight three-pointers a game in January, but he was far more effective. Thompson hit a hefty 47.5 per cent of his outside looks that month, followed it up with 46.7 per cent shooting in February, and sustained it with 45.5 per cent in March. And just like that, his overall average on the season is back up to 40.3 per cent.
In only his eighth NBA season, Thompson has, as of this week, moved up to 16th on the all-time made three-pointers list. It is true to say that this list is heavily biased towards contemporary players, as the new NBA orthodoxy features an unprecedentedly hefty bias towards a high volume of outside shots. Yet it is also entirely true to say that the efficacy of Klay Thompson is a part of why that is the case. He has shown that taking next to no dribbles offensively even at a guard position can be a potent weapon if used properly.
It is not for nothing that the Warriors' best five-man units all feature Thompson at the off-guard spot. A sweet-shooting Thompson is the perfect foil to the trio of Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, and Draymond Green alongside him. Whereas the irreplaceable, inimitable Curry is the very essence of the system, Green is the perennial extra passer, and Durant is able to get his own at any time should the offense require it, Thompson is the ever-present decoy, and the usually-present outside assassin.
Thompson is far from a mere three-point gunner, of course. Indeed, his three-point rate - a measure of how many of his total field goal attempts are three-pointers - is a mere 42.5 per cent, very much in line with his career mark of 43.7. He is remarkably consistent in this category, only once going below the 40 per cent mark (37.3 as a rookie), and never surpassing the 47.0 per cent rate of two seasons ago.
To put that into context, among players with at least 250 minutes played, that three-point rate is only the 166th highest in the league, even ranking below poor shooters such as Josh Okogie and Jerryd Bayless. Take out the minutes played requirements, and it drops to 220th; indeed, on the Warriors alone, Thompson is only the seventh-most regular three-point shooter, trailing both Quinn Cook and Andre Iguodala, and only slightly ahead of Alfonzo McKinnie.
Thompson takes the third-most shots from between 14 and 19 feet in the league, and the fifth-most between 20 and 24. Be it through curl plays or the occasional pull-up, he diversifies his scoring threat beyond the mere long range raise-ups of someone like, say, Troy Daniels. And when the outside shot was failing him early in the season, the mid-range twos were not, as Thompson hit 45.1 per cent on those mid-rangers through the first three months.
The player who is arguably already the second-best shooter in NBA history was never going to lose it. The shooting motion never changed, the balance was never lost. Thompson's shooting motion is a piece of precision engineering, and the process yielded the right results eventually.
Thompson holds the NBA record for threes made in a game, in a playoff game and in a quarter, and trails only the sport-changing talents of his fellow Splash Brother for the single-season volume records.
The man who once scored 60 points on only 11 total dribbles was never going to be cooled off for long. Thompson is the perfect third or fourth option for any team, but especially this one, and do not be fooled by the relatively lackadaisical regular season of his Warriors. They, like he, can kick it into high gear at a moment's notice.
