The Stats Behind Why Giannis Still Needs a Three-Point Shot
Ever heard of a best player on a championship team that couldn’t shoot? I’m sure you could give me long list, but to save some time, I made one for you. Here’s a list of every Finals MVP that shot below 30.0% for their career from 3-point range (min. 20 attempts).
This is a fine list and all, but it doesn’t take in account the rapidly increasing significance of the three-point shot. This next chart shows the average 3-pointers taken by a team per game from the year that each player won their Finals MVP(s).
To try to encapsulate Giannis’ struggles from three combined with the evolving game, I compiled data from the last 21 seasons (as shown in the previous charts, three-point stats become essentially incomparable before 2000 because of the shot’s far lesser importance) to make the following graph. On the y-axis, the graph below shows the difference between a player’s three-point percentage in the season that they won Finals MVP and the league-wide average from that year. The x-axis shows the difference between player and entire league in the percentage of shots taken that were three-pointers.
A couple of points:
Dwyane Wade makes things interesting because besides Tim Duncan, he is the only player remotely close to Giannis on this chart. Despite Wade being a killer in the mid-range, he was never the 3-point shooter that many think he was. However, Wade only shot one three pointer per game in the 2005-2006 season (far lower than Giannis’ 2.7), meaning it was much less of a factor than Giannis’ three-point shooting is for the Bucks. Secondly, Wade, along with his 28.4 PPG average, shot the ball at a 37.8% clip in that postseason (above the league average). Thus, I believe that his data point is a bit of an anomaly.
You likely noticed there was one data point that wasn’t a Finals MVP from the last 21 years. That would be Giannis from 2023. We’ll touch on that later.
The years in which Duncan won Finals MVP had an average 3PA that was a mere 42.1% of the 2021 3PA average, once again, showing that the shot is more important for Giannis to master than it was for Duncan. And again, similar to Wade, Giannis shot 12 times as many threes in 2021 as Duncan did in 2003, and 40 times as many as Duncan in 2005. I’d like to differentiate the two on a deeper level, but there is simply no looking past how different the styles of Giannis and Duncan are.
You may be wondering, what’s the point of all of this if Antetokounmpo showed us he could win with sub-par shooting percentages in 2021? My answer: it’s not 2021 anymore. As you can see from the 4-quadrant graph, Giannis was an even worse shooter in 2023 than in 2021. The percentage of shots that came from outside decreased, and his three-point percentage dipped to 8.6% below the league average (6.4% in 2021).
More importantly though, Giannis had a strong supporting cast in 2021 made up of Jrue Holiday, Khris Middleton, Brook Lopez, Bobby Portis, Pat Connaughton, Donte DiVincenzo, and PJ Tucker. Of the 7 players, 5 shot above the league average, Holiday and Middleton (the Bucks’ highest volume three-point shooters) shot a combined 40% from deep, and Tucker and Portis were elite catch and shooters. To compare their 7 most frequent three-point takers, besides Giannis, from 2021 to 2023, I made another graph.
It’s evident that the Bucks are no longer the team that they used to be, and further, they are the oldest squad in the league. By the time the season starts in October, their core players, outside of Giannis, once again, will be the following ages.
Brook Lopez: 35 years, 206 days
Jrue Holiday: 33 years, 134 days
Jae Crowder: 33 years, 110 days
Khris Middleton: 32 years, 73 days
Pat Connaughton: 30 years, 289 days
Bobby Portis: 28 years, 254 days
Grayson Allen: 28 years, 16 days
Malik Beasley: 26 years, 330 days
Aside from Allen, and maybe Portis and Beasley, it seems fair to expect decline from every other player here, all of which were essential to the Bucks 2021 championship run, and are currently the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 7th best players on the team. Three years from now, can we expect Giannis to single-handedly lead the Bucks past the Celtics, Nuggets, Grizzlies, 76ers, Suns, etc. to championships without a jump shot? I think it’d be a mighty task to win even one ring under those circumstances. And let’s be honest, with all of Giannis’ prior career accomplishments, championships are the only way he can significantly elevate his legacy.
After the Bucks’ triumph in 2021, Giannis was labeled as a potential top-5 or top-10 player by the end of his career. When the NBA 75th Anniversary team was released in 2022, he landed at 18th, beating out Elgin Baylor and Jerry West, and falling just short of Dirk Nowitzki and Stephen Curry.
For Giannis to surpass this competition and be a true legend of the game, he needs rings. With the league rapidly evolving into a shooters paradise, to win rings, he desperately needs a three-point jump shot. And time is running out.