Why Are the Sixers Shooting So Poorly from Three?
Listen man there’s been a lot of problems this season.
The Sixers are shooting 31.5% from three through the first 16 games of the 2024-25 season. It’s the second-worst mark in the entire NBA, and frankly something you’d expect out of a team that currently holds the second-worst record in the association.
But it’s the shooting woes that hurt more than anything else. In a modern basketball world that’s dominated by how many threes each team takes and makes, watching the Sixers consistently clank open looks off the side of the rim can hit like shotgun blasts to the chest.
There is no one problem to blame for the team’s 3-13 start. As Mike so aptly put on the Ricky last week, everything in every place is going wrong at the exact same time. I already wrote about the Sixers’ struggles to pass the ball. The team ranks 29th out of 30 teams in rebounds per game despite bringing in Andre Drummond to solve that exact problem this offseason. Even the defense, which has far outpaced the Philly offense, still only ranks 18th in the league per Cleaning the Glass, a step by the average NBA mark.
Of the top 10 players in the Sixers’ rotation, seven of them are shooting below their career three-point percentage marks this season. Jared McCain’s season and career percentage are the same thing (a clean 40%), while Drummond essentially doesn’t shoot threes, so you can take both of them out of the equation. That leaves Guerschon Yabusele as the only core Sixers piece who has exactly shot above his head this season instead of seeing his career accuracy dip by several percentage points.
Every fact about the Sixers’ shooting this season is worse than the last. Unless you’re talking about the team’s rookie or the guy they signed in last August after a breakout performance in the Olympics, it’s a roster filled with guys currently in the midst of slumps.
Each night, the shooting woes are exacerbated by how much better the opponents’ triples look in comparison. The Sixers have finished with the worse three-point percentage in 11 of their 16 games this season (which was honestly more than I expected). Additionally, the Sixers have only shot 40% from three in one game this season, while their opponents have hit that mark a whopping nine times. It’s just really depressing to look at.
Seeing how much better everyone shoots from three compared to the Sixers, it’s worth asking the question — are the Sixers shooting poorly because they just keep missing wide open shots, or are they getting significantly lower quality looks than the average team?
There’s some evidence toward the latter, unfortunately. Off the dribble three-point attempts are notably harder than catch-and-shoot attempts, for obvious reasons. Per Synergy, the Sixers shoot the eighth-most off the dribble three-point attempts in the NBA, taking 12.2 per game. However, they are again second-to-last in accuracy on this type of attempts, shooting a dreadful 24.1% on 195 off-the-dribble three-point looks. They are the only team attempting more than 10 off-the-dribble threes per game while shooting worse than 25% on them.
Tyrese Maxey has dipped from shooting 32.8% on off-the-dribble attempts to 28.4% this season, a huge disparity given he’s responsible for 67 of the team’s 195 attempts on those types of shots. Whether it’s his favorite step backs or straightforward attempts he can dribble into cleanly, Maxey has just been a little off from deep this season.
Even as he struggles, Maxey has still been a much better off-the-dribble three-point shooter than his teammates. Paul George is down to 24.1% on such shots this season. Kelly Oubre is down to 14.2%. Caleb Martin is 0-for-7. It’s all the product of a Sixers’ offense that just hasn’t worked in any meaningful way through 16 games. Each possession is a lot of dribbling around without advantages being created until someone has to launch a contested look that’s extremely unlikely to fall. To put it simply — everything looks difficult. Nothing looks easy.
The obvious solution is to just shoot better and stop bricking off the side of the rim. But the way the Sixers create better looks from deep? Well, that’s unequivocally tied to the cloud that’s hung over every Sixers’ season for the past decade — Joel Embiid’s health. When No. 21 is right and on the court, he’s an automatic offensive advantage. The most common way the team created looks from three last year was simple. Just throw the ball into Embiid, wait for him to get doubled, then fire the easy catch-and-shoot triple once he kicks it back out to you. It wasn’t rocket science.
Unsurprisingly, whatever problem the Sixers face, the best course of action forward is almost always getting Embiid back on the court, and hoping that he looks like he did over the past three seasons before Jonathan Kuminga landed on his knee in Golden State. Without that version of Embiid present, the Sixers will likely be left dribbling into heavily contested triples late in the shot clock, few of which will find the bottom of the net.
Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.
“The Danny” is brought to you by the Official Realtor Of The Process, Adam Ksebe.
I keep thinking about the Sixer need for three point shooters. They bring them in (or draft them - like Landry Shamet), they do not hit their threes here and then they are sent away only to hit threes somewhere else. Most recently, I am thinking about Buddy Held and Cam Payne. Maybe you are right about contested shots without Embiid in the lineup. Embarrassing.