I think the next time someone asks me why I can’t stand the 2020s NBA, I’ll just say “Al Horford, standing at the three point line, ready to chuck.”
Horford, one of the oldest players in the NBA, recently won a richly deserved championship ring with the Boston Celtics. He played essential minutes for the team this season, valuable especially given that uber-talented but fragile center Kristaps Porzingis missed a lot of key games. (“Uber-talented but fragile” is something of a theme in the league these days.) I’m happy for Horford. I just don’t particularly like watching him play. Horford was once known for his lockdown defense and bruising interior game; though he was never a Zach Randolph-style post technician, his athleticism and strength allowed him to bully teams inside, and he had remarkable passing skills for a man of his size. Here in the twilight of his career, though, the Celtics asked him to do something else: constantly float to the three point line and shoot. This is remarkable, given his early career - for his first eight seasons, he shot fewer than .2 threes a game. But the NBA evolved, and quite quickly, in a way that’s been discussed to death - teams started jacking threes at a heretofore unthinkable rate, shunning the midrange jump shots that once defined the league. And so after never shooting more than a half a three a game, in the 2015-2016 campaign he started shooting three a game, and has not shot less than that since. A career 37.9% three point shooter, Horford misses almost twice as many threes as he takes. But that’s winning math in the NBA.
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