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Greatest shooters ever
PER Diem: March 9, 2010 By John Hollinger ESPN.com

You'll often hear casual basketball fans lament the lack of shooting
in today's game, especially from the free throw line. But actually, we
have the opposite problem: The current NBA is littered with great
shooters. In fact, several of the best shooters of all time are
currently on NBA rosters, and most of them are more or less in their
prime.

Without leaving the top half of the Western Conference standings, for
instance, I can point out names like Steve Nash, Dirk Nowitzki, Peja
Stojakovic, Kevin Martin and Chauncey Billups, all of whom have put
together multiple seasons that rank among the best shooting
performances in history. That's to say nothing of the other great
shooters in the league -- Ray Allen, Jason Kapono, free throw-record
holder Jose Calderon, Ben Gordon, Kyle Korver ... the list goes on and
on.

But which one is the best of the best? Aye, there's the rub. We've
never had a clear metric for ranking the game's best shooters ... well,
at least until today's ill-advised endeavor. That's right -- we're
going to try ranking the best shooters in the game's history.

First, a caveat: By "history," we're limiting ourselves to the 3-point
era. There were plenty of great shooters who played prior to that
point, but we have no way to verify their cases statistically. In
particular, it appears Calvin Murphy and Rick Barry -- two players
from the 1970s who were renowned for their shooting range and rank
among the top six free throw shooters of all time -- are slighted by
today's methodology. Bill Sharman, Mike Newlin and Fred Brown also get
my apologies.

OK, now for the method. My first step is to require players pass
through a couple of fairly low "gates" in at least one season:
shooting 85 percent from the line with at least a 45 percent mark on
3s, or shooting 87.5 percent from the line with at least 42.5 percent
made on 3s, or shooting 90 percent from the stripe with at least 40
percent made on 3s.

The point at this stage isn't to determine the best shooter of all
time but to eliminate all the players we know darn well aren't the
best shooter of all time. This does an efficient job, narrowing our
list to 44 players.

From there, I set about creating a formula to rank the best shooters.
I thought I'd have to dream up something very complex to adjust for
all the variables involved, but it turned out a simple formula worked
far better than any of my more exotic concoctions. I simply added a
player's 2-point, 3-point and free throw percentages. We'll call this
"Combined Shooting Rating," or CSR for short.

CSR works for a few reasons. First, the free throw is a pretty fair
arbiter of shooting ability. It's the only true apples-to-apples
measurement we have, because it's always 15 feet from the hoop and
unguarded, regardless of what system the team runs or how the player
is used. It's only one shot among many that need to be in a player's
arsenal, but it's an important one.

Second, the yin and yang of 2-point and 3-point ability balance each
other out. Some players are more effective midrange shooters than long-
range marksmen, while others are more comfortable bombing away. And
using this method makes the system more fair to players from the 1980s
and early '90s, when teams didn't utilize the 3 as often or as
effectively.

The one thing I left out was frequency. Obviously, players who pick
their spots get higher-percentage looks than those who are the focal
point of the offense on play after play. On the other hand, it's
extremely difficult for players in the former group to shoot well
enough from the line to crack the elite on this list, simply because
of the lack of in-game repetition. Several snipers with great numbers
from the floor (Brent Barry, for instance, or Hubert Davis) couldn't
get into the top 10 because of free throw percentage, and even the
second-ranked player on our list (one of the all-time snipers) has the
worst free throw percentage of anybody in the top 10.

Also, I did set two minimum standards: 10,000 career minutes and 250
made 3-pointers. I didn't want anybody getting onto the list with a
lengthy career sparsely populated with 3-point attempts; that seemed
counter to the point of the exercise. While arbitrary, 250 nicely
separated the truly deadly long-range shooters from the guys who
merely hit midrange J's and made their free throws.

So now that our rather simple CSR method is clear, let's get to our
list of the top 10 shooters, which also apparently doubles as a great
predictor of post-career broadcasting, coaching and front-office
opportunities. According to CSR, they are:

Top All-Time Shooters By CSR
Player 2-Pt% 3-Pt% FT% CSR
Steve Nash .515 .431 .903 1.849
Steve Kerr .494 .454 .864 1.812
Reggie Miller .525 .395 .888 1.807
Mark Price .501 .402 .904 1.807
Jeff Hornacek .515 .403 .877 1.795
Chris Mullin .533 .384 .865 1.783
Peja Stojakovic .485 .400 .895 1.779
Larry Bird .509 .376 .886 1.770
Ray Allen .482 .396 .893 1.770
Dana Barros .488 .411 .858 1.757
Min. 10,000 career minutes

That's right: Steve Nash. By a mile.

I've always written that his shooting is his most underappreciated
skill, but even so, this blows me away.

It makes sense, though -- run through the numbers, and Nash crushes
every possible competitor. And it becomes even more impressive when
one considers nearly all his shots from the field have come off the
dribble. Nash and the fourth-ranked player on this list, Mark Price,
are the only two players in history to shoot better than 50 percent on
2s, 40 percent on 3s and 90 percent from the line for their careers.
And as it happens, Nash's general manager in Phoenix, Steve Kerr, is
second on the list.

One strong point of this list is that it acknowledges a few of the
game's great midrange shooters. Neither Chris Mullin nor Jeff Hornacek
shot the 3 with great frequency, for instance, but both were deadly
accurate when they did, and they were exceptional from 2-point range.

Fans of "Larry Legend" undoubtedly will be disappointed to see him
eighth on this list and to see one player of his own size --
Stojakovic -- rank just ahead of him. But Bird's greatest asset was
his ability to make high-difficulty shots, which would need to be part
of a different list entirely -- a list that would include different
players. (Kobe Bryant, for one obvious example, is nowhere close on
the above list but would have to rank high on any list of tough-shot
makers.)

If you're wondering about Nowitzki, he is 13th, and easily the best
among players 6-foot-10 or taller. Players 11 to 20 on this list are
Barry, Hersey Hawkins, Nowitzki, Davis, Korver, Mo Williams, Danny
Ainge, Allan Houston, Scott Skiles and Glen Rice.

Before I exit, some players who didn't make my list warrant
mentioning.

The first is Drazen Petrovic, who just missed my minutes cut-off
because of his untimely death in 1993. Petro's rating of 1.799 would
have put him fifth on the list, a fact that becomes even more
impressive when one considers he was only 28 when he died -- most
players improve their numbers on the above criteria well into their
30s.

The second is Calderon, who needs only 779 more minutes to crack the
list; his 1.805 career mark would place him fifth. Calderon also has
only 238 made 3s on his career and needs to make 12 more of those. You
might think his free throw percentage carries him into the top 10, but
actually it's his amazing 2-point field goal percentage that does it.
Calderon has shot 53.4 percent for his career on 2-point shots, the
best mark of any of the 44 players in this study.

Finally, two young players on the Golden State Warriors have
established a great chance of finishing their careers near the top of
this list. Rookie Stephen Curry is at 1.770 thus far in his brief
career, and should that number hold up, he'll finish his career in the
top 10. Since players' shooting often improves dramatically in their
second through fifth seasons, he could finish as one of the top-ranked
players of all time.

Then again, he also might finish second among current Warriors.
Curry's teammate, Anthony Morrow, has played two NBA seasons as a part-
time starter, and posted career marks of 48.8 percent on 2s, 45.9
percent on 3s and 87.6 percent from the line. That's good for a CSR of
1.822, which is better than every other player in history except Nash.

Obviously we're dealing with smaller sample sizes with those two, and
it's possible they'll regress in future seasons. But when we discuss
the great all-time shooters, those two are worth tracking in future
seasons to see if they warrant a spot in the conversation.


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