5 NBA 3-Point Shooters Who Need More Shots (and 5 Who Need to Chill)

Just over a decade ago, when NBA teams attempted threes roughly half as often as they do now, it would have been reasonable, mathematically, to say everyone should be shooting more from long distance.

Since then, teams have uniformly embraced the idea that three is more than two, and players at all five positions are gunning at rates that would have seemed impossible 10 years ago. In fact, we've reached a point where the blanket suggestion to "shoot more threes" isn't always the best advice anymore.

Some shooters should be juicing their volume, sure. But others would be better served by reducing theirs.

Here, based on the numbers from the first quarter of 2023-24, we'll highlight members of each group.

Victor Wembanyama's appeal has always stemmed from uncertainty. An unprecedented combination of size and skill made him a blank-canvas prospect, and the only mistake the San Antonio Spurs could have made in his development was failing to let him fully explore the possibilities.

Now that they've got a quarter-season's worth of information, the Spurs can safely scale Wemby back in a couple of areas. The first should be reining in his three-point volume.

Through 22 games, Wembanyama made only 27.4 percent of his 113 long-range attempts.

This isn't to say Wemby should put the long ball on ice for good. He's hitting 79.2 percent of his free throws, which often serves as a good proxy for three-point accuracy, and his form is free of critical flaws. There's no reason he can't be a high-volume chucker in time. He just shouldn't try to be one as a rookie.

Despite his incredibly high release, Wembanyama seems to be bothered by tighter coverage; he's making just 16.7 percent of his triples when opponents are between two and four feet away.

Simply holstering those attempts could go a long way toward juicing Wembanyama's efficiency.

While it's true Wemby's threat as a spacer will only matter more now that he's seeing increased time at center, the Spurs' offense might be better off if he put the ball on the deck and attacked instead of casting away. His passing on the move has always been intriguing, and no one should overlook Wembanyama's 72.8 percent conversion rate inside three feet.

San Antonio faces a unique challenge with Wembanyama, one it surely welcomes. His height and length mean he can get a shot off from anywhere at any time. The trick will be figuring out which of those looks he should pass on. For now, it makes sense to ease off the triples.

There's never a great time to go sub-zero from three, but it's particularly rough during a contract year.

Pascal Siakam has already made over $100 million in his career, and he's still probably good enough in his age-29 season to land somewhere between the four-year, $202.3 million extension he can sign right now and the five-year, $304 million supermax he could ink if he makes an All-NBA team.

The odds of Siakam coming closer to the high end of that spectrum are looking pretty long if he keeps shooting 25.3 percent from three.

Non-shooting forwards make for tougher fits and attract fewer max-level suitors, so you could argue Siakam actually needs to shoot more in an effort to optimize future earnings. But it's not like he's ever been a consistent knockdown threat. The closest he came to that status on any kind of volume was back in his All-NBA season of 2019-20 when he hit 35.9 percent of his 6.1 attempts per game.

That performance is a clear outlier, and rather than try to replicate it by shooting his way through one of the worst slumps of his career, Siakam might be better served acknowledging his strengths and playing to them. That'd mean changing his shot diet to further minimize jumpers while focusing on attacking the paint. That Siakam is right on pace to match last season's career-best 75.0 percent conversion rate inside three feet only supports the idea that he needs to work inside out.

In a decorated 16-season career marked by triple-doubles galore, two scoring titles and an MVP, Russell Westbrook has never once exceeded the league average for three-point accuracy. He peaked at 34.3 percent in 2016-17 but has finished below 30.0 percent in eight of the 15 seasons prior to this one, in which he's hitting 28.1 percent of his 3.7 deep tries per 36 minutes.

That's a relatively low attempt rate for a guard, but given Russ' history, it should be even lower.

In this last chapter of his career, Westbrook has struggled to succeed in any role that didn't have him on the ball for the vast majority of his court time. Guards who can't space the floor are always hard to build around, but the easiest fix is making sure they have the rock constantly. Now that Westbrook is spending more time leading the Clippers' second unit, essentially never playing with James Harden, Russ' inaccuracy matters a little less.

But it's still an issue.

At just 26.1 percent on catch-and-shoot threes and 29.5 percent when wide open, Westbrook basically bails out the defense even when taking the very best kinds of long-range shots. Driving into a crowd and seeing what happens would be a better approach by default, and though he's no longer a true-blue, A-plus athlete, Westbrook is still best in a full-speed attack.

The Phoenix Suns have been big on mid-rangers for years. They ranked first in attempt frequency in each of the past two seasons and sit in fourth place through a quarter of 2023-24. The notion that jump-shooting teams can't win at the highest levels is laughable now, but it's also true that great teams need to get a decent share of their points at the rim.

This seems like a good time to mention that Suns starting center Jusuf Nurkić's shot profile is heavier on threes and lower on close-range looks than ever. A remarkable 25.7 percent of his attempts have come from beyond the arc this season, a rate roughly four times above his career average. Relatedly, just 43.5 percent of Nurk's shots come from inside three feet. That's a career low.

Even if Nurkić's struggles to finish inside (55.0 percent at the rim ranks in the fifth percentile among bigs), somebody has to balance out the Suns' affinity for jumpers by making a layup once in a while. It doesn't seem unfair to charge the center with that responsibility. But instead of working at close range in what's usually a well-spaced floor with clear paint, Nurkić is venturing further from the bucket.

The results haven't been great. Nurkic is hitting only 27.1 percent of his triples and is on pace to blow past 2022-23's career-high three-point attempt rate. Not everyone is cut out to be a stretch 5.

Though he's only 20, Detroit Pistons rookie Ausar Thompson has already put enough on film and on the stat sheet to suggest he could wind up one of the best defenders of his generation. Even now, he ranks at or above the 96th percentile at his position in block rate, offensive rebound rate and defensive rebound rate.

He also can't shoot.

To date, we've seen just six seasons in league history in which a player attempted at least 50 threes while making less than 15.0 percent of them. Thompson's three-point-attempt total sits at 49 through 24 games, and he's made only 14.3 percent of those tries. On the bright side, the club he's on pace to join also includes Demar DeRozan, Dennis Johnson (twice), Will Barton, Greg Anthony and some guy named Michael Jordan.

Clearly, membership in that crew isn't a career killer. Most of the players in it were so good at so many other things that their coaches could live with such glaring inaccuracy from long distance. That's certainly the case for Thompson, whose defense, rebounding and disruption are more than worth the damage done by his poor shooting.

Still, Barton's 2012-13 season (13.8 percent on 65 attempts) is the most recent entry on the list, and it came before the three-point revolution firmly took hold. It's just not realistic for Thompson to thrive in the modern game unless he corrects his shooting issues...or develops an in-between game as good as DeRozan's.

The Pistons have been the league's worst team this season for dozens of reasons that have nothing to do with Thompson, so it's not as if his wayward shot is costing his team in a meaningful way. Nonetheless, it'd be best if he scaled back the jump-shooting and focused all his energy on the litany of things he's great at. He can re-tool his shot over the summer.

Cason Wallace might be the most careful three-point shooter in the league this season. He's also been the most accurate.

Consider this a suggestion for him to get a little more reckless.

Wallace is hitting a league-best (among qualified shooters) 52.1 percent of his triples, which is partly because the Oklahoma City Thunder rookie has a repeatable, balanced stroke, and partly because his shot diet is among the most discerning in the NBA.

Nearly two-thirds of Wallace's three-point tries come when his nearest defender is over six feet away, and the other third are classified by NBA.com as merely "open", which means the defender is four-to-six feet away. Wallace also never shoots pull-up threes and is a ridiculous (and matching!) 10-of-16 from both the left and right corners.

Despite his incredible hit rate, Wallace is only getting up 3.5 long-range tries per 36 minutes. In that way, he's a microcosm of the Thunder's broader offensive profile. OKC is 22nd in three-point attempt frequency but first in accuracy.

For Wallace and the Thunder, there are gains to be had by getting up more threes, even if they fall at slightly lower rates. It's tempting to call this an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" situation. But it's a lot more fun to suggest Wallace should exchange some of his efficiency for volume. He could do even more damage by shooting 40.0 percent with a much higher attempt rate.

As a general principle, Klay Thompson should take every open shot he gets. He's arguably the second-best sniper in league history, and we might go a couple of generations before we see someone with cleaner, more compact form.

The issue for him this season is that his diminished speed off the ball is making it harder to create the space necessary for clean looks. As a result, Thompson is pressing, forcing too many out-of-rhythm and contested attempts from all over the floor.

The solution: Keep shooting. In fact, shoot more!

Thompson's shot selection was a topic of conversation in the early going last year, but he responded to the slow start by putting up perhaps the best two-month stretch of his career. Old habits die hard, though, and Thompson's lack of discretion resurfaced in the playoffs.

This is simply part of the Thompson experience. He's going to take a lot of bad ones, because he's preternaturally confident and certainly hasn't forgotten how good it feels to score 37 points in a quarter or 60 in a game (with just 11 dribbles). Even more importantly, the apex version of the Golden State Warriors cannot exist without Thompson commanding maximum defensive attention away from the ball.

Thompson was 1-of-8 from three in yet another disastrous loss to the Phoenix Suns on Dec. 12, and head coach Steve Kerr closed the game with him on the bench—basically unheard of over the past dozen years. That might seem like evidence that Thompson should play and shoot less, but it's the opposite.

It's fair to say Thompson has slipped in many areas. He's not the defender he used to be, he has a harder time getting open off screens and he probably shouldn't shoot inside the arc unless it's a layup. But those shortcomings actually make it more important for Thompson to make an extremely high-volume impact from deep. Otherwise, he's not adding any value at all.

It's a cliché, and it comes with the caveat that Thompson must be better about letting the game come to him, but the only way for a shooter to escape a slump is to shoot his way out.

Indiana Pacers big man Jalen Smith has been out since Nov. 27 with a left knee bone bruise, but he should probably fire up a three within the first five seconds of his return to the floor.

Small-sample caveats apply in a big way here, but Smith has hit a ridiculous 14 of his 21 long-range attempts this season. That's an exciting development for a player who entered the 2020 draft billed as a shot-blocking, floor-stretching center. Our own Jonathan Wasserman offered the pro player comp of current teammate Myles Turner, and that analysis has looked dead-on at times.

Smith never really caught on with the Phoenix Suns, who took him with the No. 10 pick, but he converted his long-range tries at 37.3 percent when he came to Indy in a midseason trade two years ago. That seemed like proof he could spread the floor at a premium position...before he slipped to just 28.3 percent last season.

The cold, sober take: Smith simply ran hot in 14 games on low volume to start the year, and his track record suggests this kind of accuracy is the exception rather than the rule. Obviously, nobody is going to make two-thirds of their threes on any kind of volume. But at the same time, it wouldn't be the strangest development if Smith became a 40.0 percent shooter from deep.

After all, the more optimistic projections of his future included something pretty close to that.

His goal upon returning should be to see how much more volume he can add (albeit in only 15 minutes per game). A mere 3.5 attempts per 36 minutes is nowhere near high enough for someone making threes at a 66.7 percent clip.

If the Chicago Bulls are shutting down trade calls for Alex Caruso now when he's only attempting 3.5 deep shots per game, what would they do to throw off pursuit if he doubled that volume? Change their identity, move cities, fit Benny the Bull with a mustache-and-glasses disguise and reply to rival GMs with "new phone, who dis?"

Caruso is on the shortest list of the league's best defensive guards, and he might even be at the top of it. That he's also drilling 46.4 percent of his threes and making $9.4 million this year (partially guaranteed $9.9 million in 2024-25) illustrates why virtually every team in the league should want him on the roster.

This is all to say that Caruso could be even more valuable if he upped his long-distance volume to the point that his offense was more than an afterthought.

There's definitely an upper limit on Caruso's outside shooting. He's never been one to fire off the bounce when defenders go under screens; only 13 of his 67 attempts have been of the pull-up variety. But he's hitting those shots at a 46.2 percent clip, which...why not try a few more?

In fairness, Caruso's 5.3 attempts per 36 minutes are a career high. He's trending in the right direction. But imagine the value Chicago could extract if Caruso, a no-questions-asked All-Defense stud, supplemented his work on that end with a heavier dose of quick-trigger sniping.

This is a player with a career knockdown rate of 37.5 percent and two previous seasons with better than 40.0 percent shooting on threes—not some longtime bricklayer running hot. Caruso should be firing far more often.

Considering we already suggested Jusuf Nurkić should cool it from deep, maybe the best way forward is to reapportion those shots to his teammate, Kevin Durant*. That's called being solution-oriented, folks.

Far be it from us to tell one of the greatest scorers in league history how to get his buckets, but it's at least worth pointing out that KD is currently the league's most accurate three-point shooter among those who've gotten up at least 75 triples. He's a scorching 45-of-93 so far, good for a 48.4 percent knockdown rate.

The long ball has never been Durant's defining feature on offense. He's a complete three-level scorer who can get to his spot and rise over virtually anyone. Part of the reason he's always taken fewer threes than it seemed like he should is because he's so preposterously accurate from everywhere else—particularly on two-point jumpers. Coming into this season, Durant's accuracy on mid-rangers has only been below the 91st percentile once since 2011-12.

Here's the thing, though: Durant is only in the 59th percentile on mid-range accuracy this year, which is the first small indicator that maybe he should take a step or two back in search of that extra point. It's also interesting to note that, despite rougher shooting (for him) from inside the arc and elite marksmanship from beyond it, KD is taking his lowest share of shots from long range since he was a first-time All-Star with the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2009-10.

If Durant is shooting the ball, it's a good look by definition. But he's leaving money on the table by passing up threes when he's burying them almost half of the time.

*Maybe Grayson Allen should get some of those forfeited Nurkić attempts, too. He's making 46.8 percent of his flings from distance.

Stats courtesy of NBA.com, Basketball Reference and Cleaning the Glass. Accurate entering games played Dec. 14. Salary info via Spotrac.

Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter (@gt_hughes), and subscribe to the Hardwood Knocks podcast, where he appears with Bleacher Report's Dan Favale.