Kyle Lowry and the Mysterious Jumper

“I was never shooting in games before because I always drove to the basket. I have just been getting confidence from the coaches and teammates to shoot. It’s been hard work. I had the stigma I couldn’t shoot, even in high school.”

How can someone—after already establishing themselves with a lifetime’s worth of a sample size playing basketball—go from expendable backup to flowing on the aqueous edge of elite in under 16 months? Some players take an abnormal amount of time to find themselves and obtain the amount of confidence they need. Maybe it’s a single moment—a game winning shot or elusive move that makes 20,000 bent knees go straight—or maybe it’s a slow, gradual evolution. It’s quite bizarre for a player to show drastic improvement in the area of such blatant weakness, but it happens. Kyle Lowry is proof.

For the first four years of his career, and the 15 years of his life before that, Lowry had no reason to believe in his jump shot. Neither did his coaches, teammates, friends, nor family. His defining characteristic was compact toughness scrunched into a beefy six-foot body, allowing him to hit holes like a running back and create collisions with opposing big men. That’s what he was born as, and that’s what he was meant to be. But in the offseason between being dealt to Houston and spending his first full year there, Kyle Lowry chose to redefine himself as an offensive threat with rigorous practice. Every day he woke up, drove to the gym with a personal rebounder, and shot between 6 and 14 thousand jump shots, rain or shine. Lowry has since become someone his teammates and coaches could depend on with the shot clock winding down. All of a sudden his range stretched beyond four feet. It was like a light went on and everyone in Houston was basking in its indescribable warmth.

In reality none of this is true because none of it makes sense as a logical explanation. In basketball, just as in everything else, practice doesn’t translate to perfect; just because someone takes free-throw after free-throw after free-throw doesn’t mean they’ll one day hit 9 out of 10 at the drop of a hat.

Ray Allen, the NBA’s all-time three-point leader, gets agitated when people claim his velvety stroke was a gift from God. The thousands of hours spent practicing on his own, he says, are what made him so accurate. (Much is made of his arriving to arenas several hours before every other player because it’s abnormal in its obsession. Also, it’s really cool.) This is true but it doesn’t explain everything to the fullest degree. Yes, hard work helped make him better, but Ray Allen was also born with a gift to hone, like a writer capable of making paint chemicals sound interesting or a cook who can serve hot sauce covered plastic at a dinner party and receive applause. The phenomenon is genetically predestined, unpredictable, and entirely strange.

What Kyle Lowry has done is so difficult to solve because it’s more or less unparalleled. Reputations exist for a reason, as do fictitious boxes and sticky labels. Professional athletes are human beings that have tendencies, strengths, weaknesses, and habits. How did Lowry mutate his in a single season?

Last year was the first time in his professional career that upon arriving to the stadium on game days he knew beyond a reasonable doubt his name would appear in the starting lineup. Maybe that comfort level boosted his three point accuracy up 10% or doubled his win shares from the previous season.

For his career, in 4791 minutes off the bench, Lowry shot just 27.5% from beyond the arc in 335 attempts. In the 3367 minutes he’s played as a starter, that number rises to 35.4% in 390 attempts. These figures are very difficult to analyze in any way; the attempts are nearly the same yet the rate at which he makes the shot is noticeably different with the only difference being whether he’s standing or sitting when the ball is tipped at the game’s opening moment.

A possible answer could be the weighted favor of last season’s production as a full-time starter, when Lowry attempted 786% more three-pointers than his previous four years in the league combined, and made a good amount of them. But this brings us back to the mysterious conundrum of how he fixed the problem that before last year he had no solution for.

It wasn’t just the shooting, though. Last year the Houston Rockets had the best assist to turnover ratio in the entire league, which is impossible without a sure-handed starting point guard leading the way. (Lowry finished eighth in the league, in front of Deron Williams, while averaging more minutes per game than everyone before him except Rajon Rondo and Chris Paul.)

How has Kyle Lowry done what he did? If you’re a Rockets fan, treat it like every other pleasantry that knocks on your front door; don’t ask for an explanation, just smile, nod, and accept it.

 

@ShakyAnkles

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