Why Won't Joel Embiid Shoot Threes?

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

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If I told you four seasons ago, when Joel Embiid was averaging a sub-replacement-level 23 a game, that he would average around 35 a season by mid-decade, you'd probably have one guess as to how he bridged that gap: threes. After all, Joel's indomitability around the rim was already pretty considerable, and there's only so many free throws one man can draw or shoot in a game. To get that extra 12 points a night, you can't really inch your way there; you generally have to get there in the kind of leaps and bounds that only the most profitable shot in the game can earn you. And after all, that's the thing in basketball now, right? Everyone shoots threes, from your sub-six-foot point guards to your 7'3 centers -- and they usually shoot them in high volume with high efficiency. Surely Joel, as non-traditional (and as scoring-happy) an offensive big man as the NBA as seen, would have no trouble jumping on that bandwagon. 

But no: Joel has found his way to 35 a night without even the slightest uptick in his three-point shooting volume. In fact, as nearly every aspect of his game has either expanded or contracted in dramatic fashion over the course of his eight seasons on the court, his three-point shooting has remained jarringly consistent: In his rookie season he made 1.2 threes a game, and in his eighth season he's making 1.2 threes a game -- and in between, that made-threes average has not gotten smaller than 1.0 or bigger than 1.4. The conversion rate hasn't changed much either; there's a little more variation there but every percentage is still a two-digit number starting with a three. Joel is scoring more this season than any big man since Wilt Chamberlain, and he's doing it without even getting four points a night from beyond the arc.

It's a strange thing to complain about with your starting center, especially when he's scoring 30 every night regardless, even when he sits out the entire final frame. But it's hard not to feel like Joel is still leaving money on the table -- and hard not to wonder just how insanely dominant he could be if he used the three-point ball as a good-faith weapon. 

After all, it's not like Joel is a particularly bad three-point shooter. He's around 35% from deep for this year, and 34% for his career -- not particularly good, but nowhere near Giannis-level atrocious, either -- and that's with a ton of late-clock heaves built in that he ends up getting stuck needing to put up for how much he handles the ball on the perimeter. When he shoots unhesitantly in fluid motion, the stroke looks fairly natural; it's hard to believe that it ever doesn't go in. And that makes sense: He's got some of the best 16-to-18-foot range the NBA has ever seen, it only makes sense he'd be pretty killer from about 4-5 beyond that, too. 

But the shooting just never seems to come naturally for him. You could probably count on one hand the number of times this season that Jo set up beyond the arc on a pick-and-pop, received a pass from a driving guard and simply and reflexively hoisted the open triple. And when he does, usually it's either because the shot clock is about to expire, or because he's three away from a point-scoring benchmark that he doesn't want to risk taking two possessions on. Otherwise, a Joel three usually comes after deep contemplation and profound hesitation -- he gets the pass, he fakes the initial shot, he jabs at a drive, he pauses a beat, and then he decides to put it up, having exhausted all other options. Sometimes it goes in, sometimes it doesn't, but you always feel like he'd have been better off just taking the open three when it was initially available. 

I get it, to a certain extent. For most of his career, Joel has had to deal with nudniks like the TNT Inside the NBA crew haranguing him for not being post-y enough, reinforcing the outdated and probably always partially fraudulent idea that a true big man first and foremost needs to display his dominance down low. And for better or worse, he seems to not only humor but genuinely respect those takes, even as the prolificity and variety of his skill set pushes him farther and farther from the basket. So while occasionally Jo starts to feel himself from well beyond the basket, it's hard for him to really feel his feet out there -- and whenever he misses a longball, he seems to take it as a chastening, like he can hear his parents tut-tutting him for getting too big for his britches. Even as he continually confirms himself as one of the best-shooting big men the NBA has ever seen, it appears the 18-footer is as big of a compromise as he'll allow himself; really stretching out to three would likely feel like a betrayal of his positional legacy. 

And there's a certain amount of ain't-broke-not-fixing going on here, naturally. Joel is unstoppable when he gets deep position, beyond automatic from the mid-range and and near-impossible to keep off the foul line when he drives -- so why bother complicating it with a heavy diet of three-pointers? I tweeted about Joel's beyond-the-arc reluctance during the most recent Bulls game and someone even responded to me suggesting that Jo can shoot from the midrange with just a flick of his wrists but needs his whole body to convert from deep; perhaps the physical taxation and unnaturalness of three-point shooting for a man that large is something we all underrate. (There also might be a Nick Nurse factor at play, considering the Sixers have another seven-footer whose three-point shooting is basically his lone marketable offensive school -- and he's shooting even fewer threes than Jo.) And once again, Embiid is already averaging 35 a game this year, over a point per minute, scoring more and better than LITERALLY ANYONE else from the last half-century of NBA history. So what could possibly be the impetus for him to become even more prolific, even more diverse and dominant in his scoring? 

Well, there's a number of reasons, but the biggest can probably be simplified to one four-letter answer: Horf. In each of their postseason battles, and most of their regular season showdowns -- including one this past November which easily goes down as Embiid's worst performance of the season so far -- Joel has tried to punish his future/former teammate down low, and found mixed-at-best results for it. Horford thrives on Jo's down-low hesitation, on freezing him in the post and forcing him to make a move, most of which he's figured out ahead of time and is smart and sturdy enough to contest. You know what Horf wouldn't thrive on, though? Having to run out to contest Joel beyond the arc five times a half -- he's not fast, long or leggy enough that he could both shade to the basket to help on a Tyrese Maxey drive and then get out to bother an Embiid triple. And you can bet that Horf's 37-year-old ass -- 20 whole days older than me and my fucked up lower back -- would absolutely be no bueno trying to keep up with Jo if he pumped and drove on him after making a couple of those triples. 

What's more, this is exactly what the Celtics have done and will do to Joel Embiid if they meet this postseason. Remember him scrambling to have to keep up with Jayson Tatum all Game 7 last year? Even if he can avoid getting stuck on that switch too much in future matchups, now they have Kristaps Porzingis, an even bigger big than Joel who has absolutely no problem lifting up from 28 to 30 feet. They're going to draw Joel away from the basket, force him to guard on the perimeter and leverage every advantage created by him suddenly ending up behind the play. And if Jo can't make them pay by doing the same on the other end, we're already starting off the series from behind. 

And beyond that specific matchup and others like it -- it just doesn't make sense for the three-pointer to not be a legitimate part of Embiid's arsenal. Forget all the stuff about him already being a non-traditional and innovative big, about him already being an absolute knockdown shooter, about all the ways his game could expand and profit from becoming a legitimate three-point threat, and just think about it like this: Joel loves points. Loves them. All stats, of course, but points most specifically. Cherishes all 11,623 he's scored throughout his career as if they were little siblings of young Arthur. Why would he not want to master the shot that gets him the most points of all? Especially in games where now he has to get to 30 in just three quarters -- does he have any idea how much quicker he can get there scoring three at a time rather than trying to cobble together twos and ones? I mean he does, of course, but does he really? 

I dunno. Maybe he's saving the proper three-point stroke for later in his career, when he can't bang down low the same way, when he doesn't have the driving juice that he used to. Maybe then he'll pull up a chair beyond the arc and enjoy his NBA twilight bombing away from a relaxed position. But man, your mind boggles at the possibilities of what he could be right now with a trusty three-point stroke -- he's the biggest and most efficient scoring force the NBA has seen in generations even without taking advantage of the most cost-efficient shot at his disposal. Could he average 40 while shooting 7-8 threes a night? Could he challenge Kobe's 81 over a full game? Could he close a pivotal playoff series like Chris Bosh lighting it up against the Celtics in 2012? Could he win a goddamn championship?

It's frustrating that we haven't gotten to find this stuff out yet -- but it's also exciting to know that this deep into his career and already this deep into the record books with his production to date we're still nowhere near Joel's offensive ceiling. There's an entire facet of his offensive game still waiting to be explored, an entirely new level of dominance wanting to be unlocked. And if he gets there while the rest of this game is still MVP-caliber? Nobody -- not Horf, not the Inside the NBA balcony-hecklers, not even the ghost of Wilt -- will be able to say shit to Joel Embiid at that point.