Death, taxes, and head coaches wanting Anthony Davis to shoot more 3-pointers. These are life's three great certainties. In 2015, Alvin Gentry said "that's got to become a consistent shot for him." Frank Vogel upped the ante in 2021 when, according to Davis, he asked for "at least five (3's) per game this year." Now, Darvin Ham is raising the bar even further.
"I want him, if he can -- I know he won't do it, but maybe he'll shock me -- but I've requested to see six 3-point attempts a game," Ham told reporters after practice Tuesday. "Three per half, at least. I wouldn't put that on him if I didn't think he was capable."
The version of Davis that shoots and makes 3-points is perhaps the NBA's best player. We even caught a brief glimpse of it during the 2020 playoffs, when Davis inadvertently morphed into Kevin Durant for two months. Davis shot 38.3% on just under three 3-pointers per game in the Orlando bubble to go along with a 49.6% mark on his mid-range looks. The Lakers won the championship as a result. That's why his coaches keep trying to recreate it. Davis is arguably the greatest lob threat in NBA history and a lethal overall scorer near the basket. Give that player a jump shot and he becomes effectively unguardable.
The problem is that we have roughly 10 weeks of evidence suggesting Davis can shoot and more than 10 years of evidence screaming that he can't and shouldn't. In his NBA career, Davis is a 30% 3-point shooter. He's down to 23.8% over the past three seasons. He's never averaged more than 3.5 attempts from deep per game and he's never shot above 34% across an entire season. This isn't limited to just 3-pointers, either. He's made only 37.5% of his mid-range looks over the past three seasons as well.
Davis himself compounds this weakness with his preference for the power forward position. In the modern NBA, shooting is almost a requirement for all non-centers, and the Lakers have suffered offensively when they've tried to play Davis alongside another traditional big man. The decision to turn Davis into a nearly full-time center helped launch the Lakers into the Western Conference Finals last season. With Christian Wood and Jaxson Hayes in place this year, there have been startling rumblings about playing Davis more at power forward.
He simply can't shoot well enough to justify such a move. Excluding last season, in which he played only 29 possessions at power forward, here are the offensive ratings the Lakers have posted with Davis at center and power forward since he arrived in Los Angeles, via Cleaning the Glass.
Davis at PF | Davis at C | |
2019-20 | 113.1 | 112.1 |
2020-21 | 114.1 | 118.7 |
2021-22 | 101.4 | 108.7 |
That 2019-20 figure deserves a slight asterisk as many of the minutes Davis spent at center came with LeBron James on the bench. Generally speaking, the offense plays significantly better when Davis is focused on scoring near the basket and when he uses the gravity he generates there to create 3-point opportunities for his teammates.
But coaches are so tantalized by the idea of the shooting unicorn Davis could possibly be that they ignore the reality of what he's actually been in the NBA.
Anthony Davis is not a shooter. He has almost never been a shooter, and the odds suggest he likely never will be a shooter. He can make the occasional, open 3-pointer, but you'd think coaches would have gotten the memo after more than a decade of numbers have told them he shouldn't take many more of them.
