Terrence Jones sidesteps questions about Portland incident, impresses Dwight Howard

Reggie Miller, widely regarded as one of the greatest 3-point shooters of all time, didn't even hit 40% for his career. Jones doesn't need to hit 40% to be regarded as a threat.

 

Jones at Kentucky:
32.9% freshman year (10-11)
32.7% sophomore year (11-12)

Jones at RGV:
28.9% (12-13)

Jones in NBA:
26% (12-13)


26% with the Rockets. under 30% at RGV dude. that tells you he can't shoot. He can't even shoot it against inferior competition. He can't shoot it when it's a shorter shot in college.

That's why I say he's regressed. Go back and look at his video footage from Kentucky. And compare it to now. His windup and release has gotten EVEN SLOWER!!!!!



There's little things you can tell about a player early, little indicators that give you a clue as to what their career arc is going to be. This is one of them. NO SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT IN HIS SHOOTING IN 3 YEARS!!!!

Has he fired up thousands of shots??? My guess would be yes, he has. Has he gotten professional help with his game, gotten a shooting coach to break down his shot for him and help him change his mechanics??? Absolutely not. 3 summers to get in the gym, work on his mechanics and fire up a thousand to two thousand shots a day. Shoot man, if he did that for ONE SUMMER, JUST ONE SUMMER, packing it in the gym and getting his shooting mechanics down and getting up 1000 shots a day or more with a shooting coach working with him to change his mechanics.....YOU WOULD SEE DRASTIC IMPROVEMENT!!!

Terrence Jones is what he is...a great looking physical speciman...with some tremendous skills for a man of his size....who consistently underperformed in college...always leaving you thinking there was much, much more potential to be tapped that we weren't seeing.....who came into the NBA essentially the same player he was at Kentucky...no discernible improvements to his game his rookie season....who is now going into his second season. Could the light bulb still go on???? Absolutely it could. It's only his second season.

But there's a pattern here that Jones is going to have to break himself. If he is ever going to be a spread 4....he's going to have to break down his shot, frame by frame by frame with a professional coach and rebuild his shot from the ground up and then he's going to have to retrain his muscles to make that shot natural. For that matter...if Jones is going to be spectacular at any particular skill...he's going to have to go through this same process. Because right now...Jones is not spectacular at any particular thing.

Could Jones do it? Yes, he could. Will he do it???? The odds are that since he's gone the last 3 years without doing it...he probably won't. (Which is total stupidity on his part because if he could become an accomplished long range sniper he could make a lot of dough in this league.)

I said months ago that this was a make or break summer for DMo and Jones. I still believe that. Now with the acquisition of Dwight...we are in championship mode. We're not in player development mode any longer. We need players that can play effectively NOW! Not in another year or two or three. We're trying to get a ring this year! With that understanding, we all know there simply isn't minutes for at least 2 of Jones, DMo, Smith and maybe not even any of them. So, in my opinion at least 2 and possibly all 3 of them need to go sooner rather than later so we can get value for them. And in my humble opinion, if we could turn all 3 of them into an immediate player upgrade (coughderrickwilliamscough) with possibly a draft pick included we should do it. You have to move guys that aren't going to play when they still have trade value. Once they go to sitting the bench again this year after riding the pine and playing in dleague all last year they're trade value will crater. We might as well release them because their trade value isn't there. And them sitting on the bench as the 12th, 13th, 14th men on the roster does absolutely nothing to help us win a ring this year.

 

Not a true comparison. Miller...if all he did was sit in the corner and shoot the 3...would have been over 50% on those shots that we are wanting our PF to take. The only reason Miller is under 40% is because he was the sole superstar on his team and it was his responsibility to take all the money shots...all the desperation shot-clock bail out shots, all the end of the quarter, game heaves, etc.

You shouldn't even go there. We need a PF that can knock down somewhere close to 40% from the 3-point land for us to truly spread the floor. That is why we constantly saw Delfino and Garcia running with Parsons at the forward slots last year.

 

I agree that having our PF shoot 40% from three would be ideal, but we can be a champion caliber team with an average 3pt shooter, or even a really good mid range shooter, depending on what else he brings to the table.

 

We are champion caliber as currently constructed. I want to be more than caliber. I want to win the durn thing.

 

Do you think we'll win with a PF who is a 40% three point shooter, but is otherwise below average? I don't.

 

I don't know. Do you think we will win with a PF who is a 30% three point shooter, but is otherwise below average?

Name me one area of TJones and DMo's games that is above average.

 

What is an average 3 point shooter? And where are all the really good mid-range shooters? Is 30% what you consider an average 3-point shooter? Because if it is, that's the problem. In the interest of efficiency I don't believe a player should be shooting 3's that's only going to knock down 30% or 29% or 28% of them. By the same token I don't believe a midrange shooter should be taking a midrange jumper if all they're gonna do is shoot them at a 45% clip. That's simply not good enough.

You can count on one hand the number of big men in this league that can shoot the midrange jumper at greater than 45%. Those guys are even more rare than a spread 4.

Take a look at the Miami Heat team shot chart on vorped.com and tell me where a 30% 3-point shooter fits in the mix of a championship team.

 

Kawhi Leonard San Diego State:
20.5% freshman year (09-10)
29.1% sophomore year (10-11)

Was Kawhi Leonard a better shooter than TJ? No, he wasn't!
But Kawhi Leonard can shoot 37.5% in Spurs.
What can u say about? Kawhi Leonard can't shoot 3 in college, he shouldn't become a good shooter in NBA?

 

Aha....gotcha!

I said in an earlier post, "There's little things you can tell about a player early, little indicators that give you a clue as to what their career arc is going to be. This is one of them. NO SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT IN HIS SHOOTING IN 3 YEARS!!!!"

There's a world of difference in Kawhi and Terrence.....because.....Kawhi has put in the work. Dude lives basically across the street from the Arena. He spends everyday down there. He's not jetting around the country, going to clubs, etc. etc. etc. He's in the gym everyday WORKING ON HIS GAME!!

Terrence Jones' 3-pt shooting percentages haven't gone up. If anything they've gone DOWN! His mechanics haven't gotten better. They've gotten WORSE!! Go back and look at his shooting mechanics at Kentucky and you can see it for yourself.

There's a HUGE difference between getting in the gym and working on your game and in going to the gym and working out for a couple hours and then playing pickup games all summer and just getting shots up. When there are inefficiencies in a player's game he has to break down the inefficiency and REBUILD that piece of his game. Kawhi has done that. Terrence has not done that.

Now....I hope I am wrong. I hope somehow that Terrence comes out this year....if we don't make a trade....I hope he comes out and throws up 36-38%. I'd settle for that. But I don't see it right now. I see the same twisted form, the same hesitation, the same slow release, the same lack of confidence that defined his shooting last year. I don't see anything different at this point.

 

I'll be the first to confess I didn't believe Kawhi would be this good. I was quite unaware of his work ethic when he was drafted. I saw his jumper at SDS, knew it was terrible, then I saw his hands, he's got huge mitts, a huge problem for shooters to overcome if they don't work on it a lot. I missed on Kawhi because I was not aware of his work ethic. If I had known that I wouldn't have been so negative about him.

Another name: Michael Kidd-Gilchrist

We know he's got tremendous work ethic. But his jump shot is broken and has been broken since before he stepped foot on the Rupp Arena Court. I said and I still maintain about MKG....somebody has to help him fix his jumper. He needs that coach. Everything else is there. Charlotte had better get their act together with that kid or they will ruin him. He's got great attitude and work ethic. They've got to coach him up. they can't just turn him loose in the gym to throw up a thousand shots a day with those crappy mechanics. They've got to get him to break down his shot and rebuild it. IF MKG does that...the sky is the limit. He will be a perennial All-Star. If they don't do that...he'll simply be a very accomplished role player...all because of his work ethic.

 

Good post. I do agree that his shooting mechanics are ugly. Slow release and all. With more PT, he may be able to somewhat correct it. Likely, it will take another offseason.

 

Hopefully one or both of them step their games up. Will be a big plus if they do.

 

I agree that Miller would have shot at a higher percentage if he wasn't expected to be such a high volume shooter. (That's why Ilyasova has a higher 3-point % than Anderson and why Stockton had a true shooting % that was .039 higher than Jordan's.) But I disagree that we need 40%. That would be awesome if it happened. But I'd be happy with 35% from either Jones or D-Mo.

 

Are you just blind or can you not see in the stats you are using how Leonard improved his %s by 9% from freshman to sophomore year? Has Jones shown similar improvement, or has his %s gone down instead?

 

You don't know anything about what Terrence Jones has done over the summer. Stop acting like you do.

 

And the problem with Jones' mechanics isn't that his release is too slow.

It's that he holds the ball on the wrong side of his head when he sets up.

He should have the ball right over his left eyebrow (since he's left handed). But he puts the ball over his right eye:




It's a lot harder to repeat the same motion over and over when you are set up like that. A lot more room for error.

 

That's his problem.

 

^^ You are right. That is a significant piece of the shot problems that Terence Jones. But you are wrong about me not knowing anything about what he did this summer. Even if I didn't know one thing about what he did all summer, I can tell by watching him that he didn't fix his jumper. And he had all summer to work on it and it should have been priority#1 on his to-do list just like it was prioritized by Kawhi Lenard after his rookie campaign.

 

I'm not promoting Jones or Dmo. I'm not sold on those guys in any way.