Growing up in Nova Scotia, my mother and father saw classmates bring heaping lobster sandwiches to school for lunch. They were mocked ruthlessly for their inexpensive meals. When my son goes to school, I would have to sell a kidney to afford to send him with lobster sandwiches. In all that time, lobster hasn’t changed a bit.
Neither has there been a lot of change in Pascal Siakam’s 3-point percentage over the last few seasons. And yet perspectives about it have varied wildly.
During the fieriest of hot streaks in 2018-19, when Siakam was tossing in pull-up bombs from deep in the clutch with regularity, I wrote a piece about how Siakam’s jumper had improved faster than anyone’s in NBA history. (That was of course until Precious Achiuwa did about the same amount of improving between games 1 and 82 in 2021-22.) In hindsight my piece was laughable because Siakam’s shooting in 2019-20 was most certainly small sample size theater, but it remains a fact that he went from an absolute non-shooter in his rookie and sophomore seasons to a corner shooter in his Most Improved season to a deadeye from everywhere in 2019-20. It just so happens that he hasn’t since been able to replicate his pull-up shooting from that season.
In analyzing the entire team’s 3-point accuracy (or lack thereof), Simon Broder wrote, probably fairly, “at this point Pascal is probably best described as a competent catch-and-shoot option who can keep defenses honest but who shouldn’t be relied on too heavily behind the arc.”
Being able to keep defenses honest is not the same as being a good shooter. And that showed during the playoffs when the Philadelphia 76ers put Siakam’s drive under lock and key but rolled out the red carpet for his jumper. “Please,” they said. “Please shoot.” He won a couple games doing just that. But is the defense really being “kept honest” in a situation such as this?
Such a shot embodies the Siakam-jumper experience. He hit the shot. But the opposing defense yearned for him to take a different one — technically, a more valuable shot — which he turned down. What matters more, his mathematically incorrect choice, or the mathematically fantastic result? Is the play the mark of a good shooter or a bad one? Caitlin Cooper wrote about the inverse situation — a statistically poor shooter still bending opposing defenses. Siakam’s jumper, whether he makes it or not, does not seem to get respect. (Part of that is surely because he’s just so deadly off the drive, so defending him is a pick-your-poison adventure.) He is treated as a non-shooter, and that is significant. But as far as catch-and-shoot triples go, Siakam has been relatively stable for four seasons.
The league average on catch-and-shoot triples has fluctuated between 37 and 38 percent over the same time period, so outside of a blip in the Tampa Tank, Siakam has been consistently on the precipice of average. And plenty of players considered great shooters were statistically less effective than Siakam on catch-and-shoot triples last season, including Kyle Lowry, Klay Thompson, Darius Garland, Tobias Harris, Duncan Robinson, Donovan Mitchell, D’Angelo Russell, Myles Turner, Nikola Jokic, James Harden, Luka Doncic and Brandon Ingram. As far as stars go (and a few down-season shooting specialists), there were plenty of worse catch-and-shoot 3-point shooters than Siakam. Indeed, in Toronto first contents of 2022-23, a preseason game against the Utah Jazz, Siakam shot 1-for-2 on catch-and-shoot triples and missed both pullup triples he attempted.
Siakam is also inarguably a specialist as a shooter. Over the past four seasons, he has shot 39.3 percent on corner triples — the league average there has been lower over the same time period.
Furthermore, there’s more to shooting than 3-point shooting, as Raptors fans dating from the time of DeMar DeRozan would know well. And like DeRozan, Siakam does seem to prefer creating for himself in the midrange; in the above clip with the Sixers, Siakam turned down an open triple in exchange for a stepback 2-pointer, which he drained. In fact, more than 80 percent of his midrange makes were unassisted this past year, while he only recorded only four unassisted 3-point makes all season. All told, he was a 76th-percentile midrange shooter, which depending on your definition exists somewhere between good and great.
But that’s still not enough around which a team can base an offense. Siakam shot 40.6 percent on pullup 2-pointers last season, which is quite similar to DeRozan’s 43.2 percent in his last season as a Raptor. You can be an extraordinary midrange shooter and still not have it be enough to carry a team in the playoffs. Siakam even won the Raptors a playoff game in the midrange, shooting 9-of-14 from the midrange in Game 4 against the Sixers, dicing up the Sixers with 34 hard-fought points. He had the team’s best on/off offensive rating in the playoffs by a wide margin. Yet of course the Raptors were knocked out in the first round. So Siakam’s midrange shot was a necessity for team success but it wasn’t necessarily sufficient.
Thus there are a number of disparate components to Siakam’s jumper. He’s statistically a below-average 3-point shooter on the whole, largely because he’s a poor pullup 3-point shooter. He’s average on the catch, and he’s above average from the corners. On top of that, he’s a well above-average pullup shooter from within the arc.
That probably adds up to a good shooter, if an unorthodox one. But it’s not a good shooter in the traditional sense. It’s easy to see why players like Fred VanVleet or Gary Trent jr. are effective shooters. They make triples, and defenses react with extreme panic as a result. Siakam bends defenses in the opposite sense — they pack the paint, making things difficult for everyone involved. But his midrange shooting is a fantastic bailout option — the best on the Raptors — and enough at this point to open up cracks for his spin moves. Not open lanes, but he doesn’t really need those at this point to be effective. If Siakam was a non-shooter, the rest of his game wouldn’t flow. And oh, it flows.
But he’s not a good enough shooter to build a playoff-breaking offense no matter his teammates. An elite shooter in every circumstance — Kevin Durant, for example — can buoy an offense no matter who plays alongside him. Siakam is already a superstar, in the right context. If Siakam were to become an above-average pullup 3-point shooter again, like he was in 2019-20, he would be a legitimate MVP candidate. That’s how good he already is. But he doesn’t need to be a great shooter to be great.
Siakam is not the poor man’s lobster of NBA shooting. Nor is he the market price lobster that will drive the unsuspecting to tears. He exists somewhere in between, incredible in the right circumstance and lacking in others. He’s been that way for several years. It’s only our perception of him that’s been shifting.
