Since the ASB (Last 10 Games) TJones has averaged: 15.7 pts (on 53% shooting), 9.6 rebs, and 2.4 blks. Pretty awesome if he can keep up that consistency for the rest of the season and into the playoffs. We'll definitely need that.
We've all clamored for Paul Millsap over the last 2 years. We now have a slightly less developed, but significantly higher upside player in TJones. People forget that Millsap was NOT a shooter until LAST SEASON. He had never taken more than 0.5 3 point attempts per game with Utah. He now takes about 3 per and makes 35% of them. I can almost guarantee TJones is going to spend the entire offseason shooting jumpers. He is a jump shot away from a near max offer in 2016. Look at Draymond Green.....he's looking at $12+ per minimum because he can guard 4s and shoot the 3 at an average rate.
Why do you feel so strongly that he'll do this this entire offseason? Did he not do this last offseason and the offseason before that? If no, why not? Why just now start working on the jump shot? These are real questions. Not trolling here. What makes the difference your mind that this offseason will be the offseason Terrence turns it around with his shooting?
Because good NBA players continue to work on their games and especially their weaknesses in the off-season. Its what they do, and what they get paid to do.... Get better at their jobs so they can earn more money. I doubt Fin is saying Jones will turn himself into a PF version of Ray Allen this Summer by choice. Only that he thinks, like a good NBA athlete, he will work on it, and has the ability to get better.
Millsap came into the league shooting midrange jumpers. He had a jump shot from day 1. And no, he isn't a prolific 3-point shooter today. Only takes an occasional 3. But it didn't take Millsap 4 years to develop a jump shot. Irregardless, Jones hasn't built a jump shot in 3 NBA offseasons and a season between his freshman and soph years at UK and his first offseason after graduating from HS. His jump shooting numbers have not improved significantly outside of 3 feet from the basket. So if he's been working on his jumper the previous off seasons, it hasn't been successful. And if he hasn't been working on his jump shot the previous off seasons, I'm wondering why I should believe he's going to put in a great Herculean effort to improve his jump shot this summer? He knows it's been his worst weakness since before he was drafted.
In his third year in Utah, Millsap shot under 40% everywhere beyond 3 feet. So, no. Your premise is wrong. And no mention of Lowry?
What makes you think he didn't work on his shot this off season? He is shooting .375 from deep as a starter. It's not a lot but it's all we have to go on until we get more data. I Can wait to see how the season plays out. As long as he is hitting over .340 teams are going to be forced to guard him at the arc. His 3pt% has improved every year he has been in the league.
If anything, Jones looks like a guy who took data from Morey's army of stat geniuses and essentially worked on his inside game and three point shot. Both of these have improved from the prior season. Even Michael Jordan and Clyde Drexler weren't greatshooters coming out of college and it took Jordan 6 seasons to become an over 30% three point shooter. Jones isn't one of those kind of players but even the greatest constantly worked on their games and it still takes them multiple offseasons to improve.
Lowry played less minutes his rookie season than Terrence did his rookie year. And when Lowry did play his first 3 seasons he was the bench PG that all he did was D up and then when he turned the ball over he'd take it to the hole and collect fouls and get on the FT line. Lowry's FTr for his rookie contract was in excess of 50%. And....KYLE was the extreme EXCEPTION to the rule when it comes to shooters. Millsap went from 35% to 39% to 36% outside of 3 feet in each of his first 3 seasons in the league. Jones so far has gone from 26.8% to 35.4% to 32.6% outside of 3 feet in each of his first 3 seasons in the league. Overall Millsap shot 37.1% outside of 3 feet in his first 3 seasons in the league. Overall Jones shot 33.9% outside of 3 feet so far his first 3 seasons in the league. Millsap shot 39.1% from 3 his fifth season in the league. BUT HE ONLY TOOK 23 SHOTS in 76 games. It's not like he was out there shooting them. Utah's offense wasn't designed for him to shoot the 3. They were pick and roll and stick and move, not spot up and shoot. So to interpolate that Millsap had a breakout shooting season his 5th year in the league is a farce. He shot a 3 pointer about once every third game. Millsap was a 27% 3-point shooter through his 7th season (a grand whopping total of 31 made out of 117 total 3-balls attempted) in the league. It wasn't until he got to Atlanta last year that he actually started putting up the 3-ball shot with regularity. And he has proven to be an adequate shooter out there at a little over 35% on a large volume of shots. By contrast....we are and have been a 3-point shooting team basically since day 1 that Terrence arrived since his arrival coincided with the arrival of Harden. Yet in his 3rd season he's still only putting up an average of a little over one 3-point shot attempts per game. Hey, it's not like the defenses aren't giving him the shot. He's just not shooting it. What do you think Terrence's 3-point percentages would be if he took 3-4 3-point shot attempts per game?
No, not at all. His shooting numbers are so bad outside of 3 feet he obviously can improve them. My question was to finsraider. finsraider is guaranteeing that Jones will work on his jump shot all offseason and he is implying Jones will come back with a good jumper next sesaon. My question for finsraider is what is he basing that guarantee on? What has he seen or what does he know about Terrence to lead him to this strong of a conclusion that Terrence is going to work all summer on his jump shot and improve it to the point where it is a positive and not a negative to his game? What's funny to me is you keep pointing to Paul Millsap. Like Paul Millsap is some model of a good midrange shooter or a good 3-point shooter or something. 35% from the 3-point line is not great. It's average for an NBA player and perhaps slightly above average for volume 3-point shooting power forwards. And Millsap's midrange numbers......they're not acceptable. If Millsap were a Rocket we'd have him eschewing all that midrange junk in lieu of going to the glass or passing off and heading back to the corner. Millsap's efficiency would explode if he were a Rocket. I don't see the comparison to Millsap favorably...especially shooting wise. And defensively and on the glass...Millsap is and has been since his rookie season in a whole different class than Terrence.
For one, 2015-2016 is a contract year for TJones. The difference in pay between what he can do now and what he can do now plus shooting is HUGE. There's no way his agent won't have him in the gym shooting hundreds of 3s every day. Improvement comes from working hard at your craft every day, but often manifests itself in a moment. DMo didn't just wake up 10 games into the season and decide to showcase the potential we had all been watching for.....he worked hard for several years and then the right opportunity came. When will that opportunity come for Jones and his jumper? When the coaches see him hitting x percent in practice, and then encourage him to start shooting more semi-contested 3s. Neither one of us know if he will turn it around, but I'm sure he is working on it. I had given up on DMo's 3 point shooting before January, and now he's at 37% for the season on nearly 2 attempts per game.
I'm willing to bet anyone other than Jopat that TJones will have a career year next season. Contract season!!!! Just ask Ariza how that works.
True. For all we know, T-Jones did work on his shot in the offseason. But once he got injured, he couldn't exactly keep shooting jumpers while he was out given he had nerve damage in one of his legs. All he was able to do was lift weights. All I know is each season he's been in the league, he's grown as a player. He went from being a D-Leaguer as a rookie to a starter last year who could score a lot of garbage baskets without the ball and block shots from the weakside to a guy with a respectable postup game and improved defense. I'm eager to see how he handles Aldridge on Wednesday. Obviously the Rockets won't single cover the dude(well, I assume McHale's learned his lesson after last year's playoffs), but hopefully T-Jones can do a good job on him.
You're all over the place. If TJones turns out to shoot as well as Millsap, that would be great because he already provides elite finishing around the rim plus rebounding, foul drawing and shot blocking. No one was comparing them defensively. TJones rebounding rate isnt much worse. Anyway, the only point is guys can improve their shooting. That's it.
Agreed. But our system is a system built for a 3-point shooting power forward. Shooting the 3 is the one critical skill that could very well separate our starting 4 from the rest of our 4's. And Terrence has been in that system since day 1. How much more $$$ could he be set to make IF he had worked sucessfully on his 3-ball from day 1 and instead of trying to improve from 26% to 30% to 31% to....??? What if he had really worked on his 3-point shot and went from 32% to 35% to 37% this year?? In my scenario it's a lot more doable to see him jumping from 37% to possibly 39% on a decent volume of 3-point shots instead of what he has done up until this point, which is to say.....duck and dodge and avoid shooting as many 3-balls as possible. You think agents are really so slow that they're going to have their talent base wait until their contract season when they are on rookie deals to really work on the skills that they know will translate to big dollars? Any agent worth his salt knows that there is a vacuum in this league for good volume 3-point shooting bigs. The league wants and needs them. There is no reason for an agent to wait until year 4 to have his talent work on their 3-ball. That's a bad agent. And if so...that agent probably has Terrence hooked up with a bad shooting coach. It's either that or we have to consider that perhaps Terrence hasn't worked hard enough in the right way on his jump shot. Improvement comes from working hard and working right on the skills that need the most improvement. I have made this point several times. Just going out and firing up 500-1000 jump shots with bad form will only improve a player's shooting percentages incrementally. If you want the maximum improvement you have to have repetitive work doing it the right way, with the right mechanics. Up until now, we haven't seen that. We've seen the same twisted legs, the same torqued core and the same twisted release on Terrence's jump shot that we seen when he was a freshman at UK. In fact, you can go back and look at his shot mechanics at UK and you could make a good case that his mechanics have worsened as he has aged. The opportunity for Jones and his jumper are there now. Jones just isn't taking it because he knows he's a weak shooter out there and if he fires up a bunch of bricks that he'll get benched. Hey, give him credit for that. He's smart enough to know his limitations at this stage of his career. (And we did just see one game against Detroit where he actually went out there and cranked some jump shots successfully and looked like he wanted some more of them. So, perhaps he's on the precipice of turning around that huge part of his game that is missing and if so he'll be on the precipice of stardom. I guess we'll have to wait and see.) Hey now. Quit saying what I'm repeating. (Just kidding of course.) As to your point on DMo..Dmo doesn't have the mechanical problems with his shot that Terrence has. DMo's shot is a little easier to fix. He's simply gotta add some leg bend and make sure he gets lift from his toes on his shot. Everything else is there for DMo. That's why you see him taking the leaps in his 3-point shooting this year. Now he needs to increase his confidence to match those percentages and get off more of those shots than he has been up until this time.
