A celebration of Reggie Bullock; or, the plasticity of 3-point rate
Reggie Bullock has grown within this very season from a moderately good 3-point shooter to an absolute high-volume gunner. How has his newfound variety of shot attempts led to the change?
Last year, I had a theory I couldn’t prove. It was about 3-point shooting draft prospects and whether or not they could increase 3-point rate upon getting into the league. The theory was sparked by a discussion I had with another draft aficionado — we were wondering whether a particular 3-and-D 2 guard would be limited because he only put up a 3PR in college of .36, or about five 3-point shot attempts per 40 minutes.
The argument was that if you aren’t a shot creator, you need to really put up a higher volume of 3-point shots to be an impact player on offense from the guard/wing spot. Therefore, a prospect whose 3PR was .36 wouldn’t have a huge impact on offense even if they shot 40% from three. And, critically, if you couldn’t increase that 3PR significantly, then that was that regarding the aforementioned prospect. They would be stuck making only a mediocre impact on offense.
I agreed that 3-and-D guys need to take and make a lot of threes to really impact the offense positively. My difference of opinion was that 3PR isn’t static, and that it is dependent on both shooter and schemes. For example, if someone is a spot-up shooter exclusively — no off-the-bounce threes, no JJ Redick-style movement threes — you would think that player needs to receive a heck of a lot of stationary spot-up opportunities from their team to get a high 3PR, which seems tough.
But if that player learns how to pump fake and side step, that’s a few other threes “unlocked” — threes they previously couldn’t attempt, but now can. And if they decide they want to spot up from 30 feet sometimes, that’s probably going to unlock some more threes. If their team begins to run more, maybe they get transition threes. And if they decide to take more heavily contested threes by speeding up their release unnaturally sometimes, even more opportunities — assuming they can successfully shoot these additional types of spot-ups without compromising accuracy, of course. And so on, and so on, without really even adding true off-the-dribble threes or movement threes off screens. Are some of these threes harder than your basic open, stationary, unhurried catch-and-shoot? Sure, but it’s nowhere near the increase in difficulty that sprinting off a screen to shoot off movement or shooting off a crossover requires. It’s much more feasible for good shooters to add these minor variations.
Anyway, I couldn’t conclusively prove that 3-point rate was not static — not written in stone — or that someone with a mediocre college 3PR could become a high 3PR shooter in the pros. Doing a meta-analysis of a collection of hundreds — if not thousands — of data points is beyond my abilities... I’m a writer and a lawyer, not a data scientist. But I do believe Reggie Bullock is as good a case as any, anecdotally, that 3-point rate is in fact impacted by many factors, including the shooter’s skillset, decisions, and their team’s determination of what threes are acceptable.
Activist Reggie Bullock has always been a shooter. Or shooter-ish. But not for a few years, nor consistently ever, has he been a SHOOTER — feared by the other team. I was out here on Lil Nas X’s Twitter slandering him in the first half of the season, calling him a fake shooter because he was hovering around 36-37%, with a 3PR right around .50 — a hair over his 2019-20 3PR of .45. How good was he? I suspect most Knicks fans would tell you he was “fine.” Despite good defense and passable shooting (for a Knick), he was certainly not good enough that we would stop calling for Alec Burks, Immanuel Quickley, and Frank Ntilikina to play more minutes at the 2 than he was.
And then a funny thing happened. He started shooting more. Shooting threes more often, to be specific. It began towards the end of the first half of the season, when he really began to establish himself as The Starting Shooting Guard. And then after the break, he started shooting EVEN MORE.
Courtesy of my fellow Stricklander Tyrese London:
Reggie Bullock pre-All-Star break: .605 3PAR, 37% on 4.6 3PA
Reggie Bullock post-All-Star break: .817 3PAR, 43% on 7.6 3PA
A .605 3PR is solid, a definite improvement over his rate last year. But .817?!?! A rate of .700 is the province of Danny Green and Cam Johnson. A rate of .800 is the exclusive domain of guys like Davis Bertans, Buddy Hield, and Duncan Robinson.
Mike Breen said that Julius Randle told Reggie over the break that he needed to put ’em up more, and boy was he right, and praise Allah that Reginald listened. The Knicks are 22-6 when Reggie scores in double figures — and that’s for a few reasons.
No. 1: This is, good vibes aside, an offensively-challenged team, and more made shots from guys who take, and therefore make, less shots tends to help an offense.
No. 2: High-volume floor-stretching is a compound factor. That’s why Duncan Robinson strikes terror into defenses. All of a sudden the defense is on their heels much more. More mistakes. More misdirection. All of a sudden the offense is capable of those short multi-3-pointer bursts that they can use to put close games out of reach and make comebacks out of thin air. Of course, it helps that other guys are also scoring well at the same time (hi RJ, Julius, Derrick), but Reggie’s role in the Knicks’ newfound sparkiness can’t be understated. He’s basically turned into 2 guard Duncan Robinson/Davis Bertans, putting up a 66 TS%, a .800 3PR, and shooting 43% from distance on high volume... with defense. He doesn’t shoot off movement quite as much as Duncan and is shorter than both of them, so it’s not quite apples to apples, but to even be in the same stratosphere as those two as shooters is major. Perhaps the best analog is Playoff Bubble Jae Crowder in Miami.
So how is he doing it? We know he’s taking more threes, but what does that actually mean on a possession-by-possession basis? What kind of threes is he taking that he wasn’t before? It’s not like he was just getting the ball in the corner and dicking around holding it a la Elfrid Payton before — he was already taking the obvious attempts, the low-hanging fruits. So what gives?
TO THE TAPE!
I don’t know how much is due to concerted team effort, and how much is due to Mitchell Robinson going down and Nerlens Noel playing 30-plus minutes, but the Knicks have leapt to the top of the league in points off turnovers for the duration of the last month and change. Reggie is taking advantage — see the above three where he puts it up without even completely being set or balanced.
The above transition three is notable, because he pumps and sidesteps before putting up another hair-trigger shot. Last year, the most frustrating shot was a Reggie pump-and-dribble 18-footer. Those still happen sometimes, but much less often.
Look at this semi transition three! He tiptoed to actively AVOID a long two, banking on the Pelicans being in perpetual disarray defensively (good bet) and not navigating multiple screens.
Quick trigger shots like the one above, where a shooter intentionally speeds up his release, are a bad idea for all but the best shooters. The trade off in new attempts is not usually worth the decreased accuracy. But Reggie hasn’t suffered a loss in accuracy, at least so far, on these kind of shots. I’d be remiss if I didn’t include this quick-fire game-saver:
And then we have 30-footers:
With a tie game in the fourth! He totally missed this one, but he’s made some of these “4-pointers,” too. It just shows how much he’s willing to expand and diversify his 3-point shot diet. These far shots for spot-up guys have long been used by a 7-foot-3 ex-Knick, as well as some Houston Rockets alums like Robert Covington and Eric Gordon, and I am happy the Knicks employ not one, but two guys who can make them.
So is his success something we chalk up to player development? To coaching? To input from the Knicks’ growing analytics team? To captain Julius? I have no idea, so I will say yes to all of the above until proven otherwise.
Whether it’s development, or coaching changing the Knicks’ players, or whatever, we’ve written a ton about Randle and Barrett and Quickley, the three biggest individual success stories of the season. In my last piece I also talked about the rebounding development of Mitchell Robinson, who friend of the site PD Web considered on our podcast as the Knicks' other Most Improved Player due to his defensive disciplinary improvements. Well, we can safely add Bullock to the list as well. Even if he comes back to Earth and doesn’t remain in the Duncan, Buddy, Davis tier of shooters, he is still producing prolifically on offense while guarding the opponents’ top perimeter threats regularly, something none of those guys do. Is it sustainable? I have no idea. Will he be back doing this in the Garden at capacity next year? Hopefully! In the meantime I would focus less on the future, though, and celebrate the contributions of our erstwhile, fashionable, range-having shooting guard.
Reginald Ryedell Bullock. Put some respect on that name!
