A wide open three is not bad shot selection. Especially not when you are around the 5th or 6th best three point shooting team in the league.
Celtics currently take the 6th most three pointers in the league while making them at the 6th best rate. Given those numbers, the Celtics take exactly the right amount of three pointers. If you are the 6th best three point shooting team in the league, you may as well take the 6 the most three point shots.
The Celtics are only 11th in the league at 2 point FG%. So it's not like if they move their offense away from three pointers to 2 point shots, they are moving their offense into an area that the team excels at. The Celtics aren't great at scoring from 2. They are just good at it.
If you are the sixth best 3 point shooting team you don't stop taking threes at the league's 6th best rate so you can take more twos at the league's 11th best rate, especially when your two point game yields on of the poorest amounts of FTs created in the league.
The Celtics offense is a top 8 offense in the league. It's a good offense. It's just not going to have the consistency of a Milwaukee or GSW because Milwaukee has a dominant 2 point shooting game(best in league) and GSW are the best passing and three point team in the league.
The 3 was open, But I wouldn’t call it wide open; the defender was a few feet away.
More importantly, (1) there were 19 seconds on the shot clock with 52 seconds on the game clock, Cs up 5; and (2) Horford had a potential mismatch on the block or an option to set a screen.
Taking 5-10 seconds to work for a Horford postup seems like a much better option, with plenty of time to find a cutter or pass out for another look at a 3. Hard to imagine this was the best shot they were going to get and of course it prolonged the game.
https://twitter.com/StoolGreenie/status/1106992428890775552?s=20
I was talking wide open threes in general. That doesn't mean that some threes, when looked at in context, aren't really bad shots. Morris' shot was real bad.
That shot against Sacramento where Baynes had an uncontested dunk but threw it outside to a wide open Morris who missed the three. Even if Morris makes it, that is a bad shot. Take the dunk.
And you know what, every team takes those bad shots several times a game. I don't think the Celtics take those dumb shots any more or less than most teams in the league.
But the point of my original post is that most of the Celtics three point shots aren't bad or lazy shots. Most are shots the system hopes to create.
It just seems to me, especially from reading the game threads, that some think that the team's reliance on threes is lazy and bad basketball. It's not. Stevens system attempts to create those shots and are considered quality shots in the team's system.
And, the Celtics are a very good three point shooting team. They shoot 36.5% from three as a team. They need to exploit that. Stevens system does that.
All that said, that doesn't mean the Celtics don't take several lazy threes or bad unforced threes a game. As I said, I think every team does. It doesn't mean the Celtics team energy for many games was awful so the team took lazy threes all game, they have done that. Many times.
But even when the Celtics offense has been on great runs this year, many still complain about the threes. It's what this system is and it's what they are good at. I think the problem this year has been horrid team chemistry rather than poor shot selection or lazy three point shooting.
Topic: Did Brad almost blow this one -was Morris 3 point shot bad shot selection (Read 3425 times)