Best Shooters in the NBA in 2022

There is little that is more valuable to a basketball team than having one of the best shooters in the NBA. Because the NBA preseason has recently gotten underway, we wanted to take an emotionless, data-driven approach to answering the question “Who were the best shooters NBA shooters in the 2022 season?”.

We’ll begin by discussing the straightforward metric we use to analyze the NBA best shooters. Then, we’ll answer the question of who the best NBA shooters were in a few different ways. Finally, we’ll try to point out any curiosities we find in the data.

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Our Metric for the Best Shooters in the NBA

One of the biggest difficulties in determining the best shooters in the NBA is that not all shots are created equally. Regularly, the league leaders in field goal percentage in the NBA are centers. These are guys who rarely shoot from beyond 10 feet or so because their accuracy is not good enough. Players who only take the easiest shots should not be among the best shooters in the NBA.

True shooting percentage tries to correct for this fact by weighting more heavily shots made from beyond the three point arc. This metric is beginning to move in the correct direction, but it still misses the mark.

Rather, a metric for the best NBA shooters should reward players for being more accurate on harder shots. However, the reward shouldn’t be as arbitrary as weighting three pointers more. True shooting percentage fails because it still doesn’t differentiate between layups or jump shots. It doesn’t differentiate between corner threes and deep bombs like Steph Curry takes.

Our metric uses the NBA’s natural division of shooting into the ranges 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, 15-19, 20-24, and 25+ feet. For each of these categories, we compare how accurate an individual player is against league average. If a player is above league average in a category, then they get credit for being a good shooter. The more shots they make in an efficient manner and the more above league average in accuracy they are, the more credit they’ll get.

We call this metric shooting points above replacement (SPAR). It is computed by taking a player’s total points and subtracting the expected points a league average player would score given the exact same shots. A positive number meant that a player scored more points with their selection of shots than a league average player would have scored with the same shots. A positive number is good, a negative number is bad. Combining volume with accurate shooting is leads to the largest SPAR score.

Finally, because we want to reward shooting from distance, we want to discount shots at the rim. Such shots are highly variable in their difficulty based on a players’ size and who is defending them. Therefore, we only look at shots from at least 5 feet from the rim in computing our metric.

2022 Top 10 Best NBA Shooters with SPAR

We ran our numbers for the 2022 NBA season to come up with the top 10 shooters based on SPAR. We present two lists. The first is our “official” list of best shooters by pure SPAR.

Player	SPAR
Kevin Durant	185
DeMar DeRozan	155
Seth Curry	145
Trae Young	141
Nikola Jokic	129
Desmond Bane	115
Chris Paul	114
CJ McCollum	113
Jrue Holiday	113
Luke Kennard	112

This list looks roughly like you might expect. Durant, Seth Curry, and Trae Young are widely regarded as three of the best shooters in the league. DeRozan had a great year – nearly in the MVP conversation for many analysts – and unsurprisingly showed up near the top. Jokic, CP3, McCollum, Jrue Holiday, and Luke Kennard are all widely regarded as shooting threats. Perhaps the only notable parts of this list are the absence of Steph Curry and instead the presence of Desmond Bane.

Some of these players – like DeRozan and Jokic – are on this list because of the massive volume of shots they take. Others – like Seth Curry and Kennard – put up huge SPAR numbers because their accuracy is off the charts for the shots they take.

SPAR per attempt is a good measure of efficiency. The table below shows which players were the most efficient with their given attempts. This list tries to get rid of volume and look only at who is the most accurate. Only players who accrued at least 40 SPAR season-long qualify.

Player	SPAR / 100 Shots
Davon Reed	22.2
Seth Curry	19.8
Luke Kennard	17.7
Kevin Durant	16.7
Chris Paul	15.6
LaMarcus Aldridge	15.3
Deandre Ayton	13.6
Tyrese Haliburton	12.6
Anfernee Simons	12.0
Jrue Holiday	11.9

A lot of the same players show up in this list as the previous list. These numbers are impressive, though. For example, on a set of 10 shots, Kevin Durant will score 1.67 more points than an average NBA shooter given the same shots. Over the course of a game, this means Durant is good for between 3 and 5 points more than an average player just by being a great shooter.

The Worst Shooters in the NBA in 2022

Our metric can also be used at the other end of the spectrum. If a player accrues negative SPAR, that means that they scored fewer points than a league average player given the same shots. The players with the most negative SPAR can be considered the worst shooters in the NBA. Here is the list for 2022.

Player	SPAR
Julius Randle	-113
Jalen Suggs	-105
Russell Westbrook	-93
RJ Barret	-82
Nickeil Alexander-Walker	-71
Cade Cunningham	-71
Talen Horton-Tucker	-70
Chuma Okeke	-66
Kilian Hayes	-64

My initial main takeaway is that this is a tough list for the Knicks fans out there. Two of their starters are 2 of the four least efficient/worst shooters in the NBA. This is not a recipe for success. The other veteran, Russell Westbrook, is also no stranger to this list.

A lot of the other players on this last are high volume rookies and second year players that actually had pretty good years. Suggs, Cunningham, Okeke, and Hayes all had solid seasons. However, because they haven’t developed enough yet, they are relatively inefficient on high volume and end up on this list.

This list is kind of fascinating. To end up on this list, you cannot be an atrocious shooter. If you are really, really bad, then you’ll be benched and won’t get the opportunity to miss enough shots to end up on this list. These players are just good enough to not get benched and just good enough to take a lot of shots but just bad enough to miss a ton of them.

Most and Least Efficient at the Rim

The last few sections used a specific metric to determine the worst and the best shooters in the NBA. This metric left out shots at the rim. The rationale for this was that shooting at the rim is not what we would traditionally use to determine good shooters.

That doesn’t mean that efficiency and good shooting near the rim is unimportant. Instead, the ability to finish at the rim is another hugely important skill. It just isn’t quite what we mean by being one of the “best shooters in the NBA”.

Therefore, we ran the numbers again to see who the best and worst shooters in the 0-5 foot range were. This list can be interpreted in the same way as before – shooting points above replacement (SPAR). The first list is the top 10 best at-the-rim finishers.

Player	SPAR (0-5 Feet)
Giannis Antetokounmpo	139
LeBron James	108
Rudy Gobert	108
Jarrett Allen	104
Robert Williams III	93
Mitchell Robinson	90
Nikola Jokic	89
Daniel Gafford	88
Montrezl Harrell	83
Dwight Powell	82

There are three things in this list that stand out to me. First, Giannis is so unbelievably far above everyone on this list, it is remarkable. His ability to finish at the rim at high volume is unparalleled and is the reason he is one of the best players in the league.

Second, the fact that LeBron James is still so high on this list at his age is also remarkable. Banging down low is a young man’s game. Except, apparently, for Lebron James. And, speaking of time lords…

Robert Williams being fifth on this list is particularly impressive considering his shortened season and limited minutes in the games he played. However, if you watched the timelord play when he came back to the playoffs, maybe this doesn’t surprise you at all – he was electric. If you divide SPAR by attempts to estimate a player’s efficiency, Robert Williams places second of qualifying players just behind Mitchell Robinson.

Now, we turn our attention to the least efficient players at the rim.

Player	SPAR (0-5 Feet)
RJ Barrett	-107
Russell Westbrook	-78
LaMelo Ball	-71
James Harden	-67
Jaren Jackson Jr.	-60
Alec Burks	-56
Isaiah Stewart	-54
Nickeil Alexander-Walker	-53
Cade Cunningham	-52
Reggie Jackson	-51

This list is fairly comparable to our overall worst shooters. RJ Barrett, Russell Westbrook, and others appear on both lists. Interesting, though, is the presence of LaMelo and James Harden. These are widely regarded as great players (maybe not Harden last year?). Nonetheless, their at-the-rim efficiency is pretty poor.

A Comment on Usage Rate

One thing we did not account for in this analysis was usage rate. Long story short: players who take more shots generally have lower shooting percentages. This is because high volume players are usually heavily defended because they are the best players on the team.

For example, compare Steph Curry to Seth Curry. Steph routinely takes heavily contested shots with defenders in his face. Seth Curry, on the other hand, takes a lot of open shots. This results in Steph having an overall worse shooting percentage.

However, Steph curry faces tougher defense strictly because he is a better shooter than Seth Curry. This is counter-intuitive; sometimes being one of the best shooters in the NBA actually forces your field goal percentage to decrease.

In order to counteract this fact, we could adjust for a player’s usage rate. However, what would be more accurate would be to take into account the defensive quality on every shot. For example, adjusting field goal percentage based on the distance to the closest defender might do the trick. Sadly, such data is not readily available to the general public and is likely proprietary data to the NBA itself. This is yet another example of why we need better tracking data to improve our ability to do sports analytics as laymen.

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