..I'd argue that he doesn't need to be efficient with his outside shot, he just needs to hit enough 17 footers to keep the defense honest - he is streaky with it, but he's shown enough in the past to open up his game for drives...he's also a good off-ball cutter, so he has enough game to pull it all together - he did this during his "break out" year, where he was hitting pull-ups at a decent rate and completely forcing his man to stay up on him...
I don't disagree with this. Although I think he needs to be sticking to 17 footers rather than 3 pointers. Basically he is in the same position as Rondo. He needs to take the open shots when they are there, enough to keep defenses honest. Although like Rondo, he should be looking for spots on the floor where he is more comfortable shooting, and not just hang on the 3 point line.
Well, they can't just look for spots where they're comfortable, the team has needs in terms of positioning, and they should move accordingly to the coaches instructions and the reading of the defense. If not, with a line-up of Rondo/Tony/x/Powe/Perkins you'd have four guys sticked around the paint. It's curious that last season we used some plays taken out of Calipari's playbook and Doc was using Rondo as he was Joey Dorsey, playing at the 5. Really unorthodox, but a good demonstration of the kind of problems that guards with such a poor outside shooting create to their own team.
TA's jumper is not so bad that we should give up on it. TA has gone entire seasons hitting over 30% from free. He is a career 30% 3 point shooter and a career 76% free throw shooter. He is a far better shooter then Rondo.
I agree that he is a far better shooter than Rondo, especially off-the-dribble, and that he should keep working on his jump-shot. However, I doubt he'll ever have more than a streaky and highly unreliable and inconsistent long-range jump-shot: you pointed Ricky Davis, but Allen, with a career .301% 3 point shooter, has hit 50 3pt shots through his career, aprox. 1 per 95 minutes, while Davis, a .361 shooter, has hit 535 triples, 1 per 38 minutes on the floor. That's a very, very huge gap.
When a 26 years old is airballing open 3s and missing jump-shots left and right (and the range of the misses, as well as the inconsistency, are very good tools to evaluate a jump-shot), I think the room to improvement is severely limited. It may be enough to allow him to hit a couple of jumpers exactly when we need though.