Victor Wembanyama is taking longer shots. No, not that he’s taking more 3s. You know that already. It’s that he’s taking shots from farther out from everywhere. The 7-foot-4 guy has decided to stretch the floor for himself.
Let’s start with the basics. Yes, Wembanyama is taking more 3s. Drastically more 3s. His 3-point rate is up 50 percent from last year. Slightly more than half of his field-goal attempts are 3s. Again, he’s 7-4.
Wouldn’t a guy that tall and that long want to take more shots closer to the basket? It’s a fair question. Wembanyama has decided the answer is no. The surprise is that his shooting efficiency hasn’t suffered. His effective field-goal percentage is up. His 3-point percentage is up slightly. That’s despite him not only taking more 3s, but longer 3s. His 3s, on average, are a half-foot further out this season than they were as a rookie, according to PBP Stats.
Wembanyama’s entire shot profile has changed in his second season. His average shot is 17.3 feet away from the basket this season, which makes sense because of the volume of 3s he’s taking, but Wembanyama is also taking longer 2s.
His average 2-pointers are a foot deeper. The percentage of his shots at the rim has dropped pretty drastically (from 37 percent last season, according to Cleaning the Glass, to 29 percent this year). He’s halved the rate of shots he takes from 4-to-14 feet from the basket, while taking more long 2s.
But, and this is the true wonder of Wembanyama, his shooting numbers are up across the board. He has been a more dangerous shooter from every spot on the floor.
That explains how he’s been able to counteract what would normally be curious trends. Last year, Wembanyama had a dunk every 6.3 shots and a shot at the rim every 3.4 shots. This season, he’s dunking every 8.9 shots and taking a shot at the rim every 4.6 shots. The rookie who was eighth in the NBA in dunks is now ranked 14th in that same category. Unsurprisingly, his free-throw rate has dropped too — he’s in the 19th percentile among all bigs in the rate of shooting fouls drawn — even if he is significantly better from the line this season.
Notice the pattern?
Fewer high-scoring games?
One of the big stories of the NBA the prior two seasons was the number of high-scoring outputs by players. Someone scored 40 or more points 203 times during the 2022-23 season, an NBA record. Last season, there were 162 times when a player scored 40-plus — the second-highest ever. But that has tailed off this season. High-scoring games are coming at a slower pace this season. There have been just 28 so far this year, which would project for the fewest amount since the 2017-18 season.
There have actually been more triple-doubles this season (40) than games of 40-plus points.
But it is interesting to see who those high-scoring games have come against. There have been 190 40-plus efforts since the start of the 2023-24 season, and nearly a third have come against five teams. Here are the teams that have given up the most 40-plus point games since Oct. 2023:
The Joker’s heavy workload
Nikola Jokić is playing more minutes than ever this season, and the Denver Nuggets need him for every one.
Jokić is averaging 37.6 minutes per game this season — three more minutes than his career high. The bump comes the season after the Nuggets ran out of gas in the second round of the playoffs, and after general manager Calvin Booth pointed to their early season efforts as a source of fatigue.
But Denver and coach Mike Malone have little choice. The Nuggets are 11-8 in a super competitive Western Conference — that record would be good for the No. 5 seed in the Eastern Conference but instead they’re stuck in eighth right now in the West. The team is more reliant on Jokić than ever — he is averaging a career-high 30.1 points and 10.4 assists, and 13 rebounds. His on-off numbers are more drastic than they’ve ever been. Denver is 31.8 points per 100 possessions better when he plays compared to when he sits, per Cleaning the Glass, and the Nuggets score 32.7 more points per 100 possessions when he plays than when he sits. As a comparison, Stephen Curry is No. 2 in the league in that stat, and the Warriors score 18.6 more points per 100 possessions when he plays than when he sits.
Denver can’t afford to sit Jokić. The Nuggets have outscored teams by 157 points this season when he’s on the floor and been outscored by 124 when he sits.
Malone can try to turn to the divine to get through Jokić’s bench minutes, but that could only take him so far.
“I pray,” Malone said on ESPN Tuesday. But then he added, “We just got to find a way to hold some water while Nikola is on the bench. I want to be careful with running him too many minutes, but fact of the matter is we’re 2-3 these last five. We need a win, and we’re going to use Nikola as much as we need to to get this win.”
Jokić ended up playing 40 minutes Tuesday against the Warriors in a four-point win. The Nuggets haven’t been able to build the situations where they could potentially give him a longer breather or time off. Last season, the Nuggets played 9.9 percent of their possessions with the score a 20-point game either way, and in 2022-23 it was 8.6 percent, according to PBP Stats; this season it’s 7.9 percent.
The Nuggets had 33 wins of 15-plus points over the last two seasons (the fifth-most in the NBA), but this year they have only two so far. Not surprisingly, those two games have been two of Jokić’s slowest nights this season — he played about 29:47 in one and 33:37 in the other.
The question, of course, is will and can this continue? A few blowouts would help.
Speaking of blowouts…
One way to check how good a team is by looking at how frequently it is blowing out its opponents. The best teams win by the most.
The 2023-24 Boston Celtics played 13.1 percent of their possessions up by 20 or more points, according to PBP Stats, while the Oklahoma City Thunder were at 9.6 percent. The 64-win Phoenix Suns played 9.1 percent of their possessions up 20-plus. The 73-win Warriors did it 9.4 percent of the time, while the 2016-17 Warriors (Kevin Durant’s first season) were up 20 or more 14.8 percent of their possessions.
The leaders this year are not surprising: The Memphis Grizzlies are at 13.4 percent, the Cleveland Cavaliers at 12.9 percent, the Celtics at 10.92 percent, the Houston Rockets at 10.1 percent. (On the flip side, the Washington Wizards have never led by 20 and have spent 18.4 percent of their possessions down 20-plus).
But the team that has played the highest percentage of their possessions up 20 or more this season may surprise you: the New York Knicks. They were at 19.86 percent entering Thursday night’s game. They have played nearly one-fifth of their season up by 20 or more.
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(Photo of Victor Wembanyama shooting from distance: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)
