New York Knicks: 3 Must-know shooting stats from last season
By Adam Kester
New York Knicks: Stat #1 — Julius Randle’s pull up shooting
Julius Randle Pull Up Shooting Stats: 41.5% FG, 40.0% 3p FG
Julius Randle took a huge statistical leap in some major categories last season.
Randle’s improvements were so dramatic that it led him to being named an NBA All-Star, a member of the All-NBA 2nd Team, and the NBA’s Most Improved Player.
What is pull up shooting?
Essentially, pull up shots are shots that a player took off the dribble. Self-created shots where a player worked to get the shot on their own.
Like any stat, it’s imperfect and doesn’t tell the full story.
A player is on the fastbreak, takes a few dribbles, and realizes that no one is guarding them, so they decide to pull it from three. That would classify as a pull up shot.
Someone taking their defender one-on-one, hitting them with a few dribble combos, and hitting a tough, contested 3-pointer is also a pull up shot. So they are not all equal in terms of difficulty.
However, with a full season of data, we can use pull up shooting to help us determine who the best shot creators in the NBA are.
Julius Randle has some critics who have pointed to this past season as an outlier. They use his poor playoff performance as an indicator of a poor season to come.
Randle didn’t have a lot of help. He didn’t play alongside a lot of dynamic guards where he could be the beneficiary of open shots. He had to work for a lot of his buckets.
On 3-point shots that came after he took seven or more dribbles, Randle shot 41.7 percent. He has no problem knocking down tough shots.
It’s hard to imagine any kind of extreme regression for Randle, who will now be playing alongside Evan Fournier and Kemba Walker in the starting lineup. A much improved starting five.
Maybe he won’t hit the 40 percent from 3-point range clip again, but I’m buying Randle’s shot. If you followed the New York Knicks closely last season, you saw and you heard just how much work Randle was putting in with assistant coaches Kenny Payne and Johnnie Bryant. He put in the work to become a 3-level scorer.
It wasn’t just reflected in his 3-point shooting and pull up shooting, it showed up in his free throw percentages. Randle’s free throw percentage jumped from 73 percent to 81, a great indicator of future shooting success to come.