Siakam adds three-point shooting to expanding arsenal

Josh Lewenberg

TSN Raptors Reporter

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TORONTO – Just over a year ago, Pascal Siakam was mired in one of the worst three-point shooting droughts imaginable amidst one of the worst three-point shooting seasons of all-time.

Over the span of 15 games from late-November to the tail end of December 2017, the Raptors’ energetic forward missed 27 consecutive attempts from beyond the arc.

When it was all said and done, Siakam hit just 22 per cent of his three-pointers during his sophomore campaign. Only nine players have shot a worse percentage on at least 100 attempts since the NBA introduced the three-point line in 1979, including Charles Barkley twice. By that metric, it was the 11th-worst three-point shooting season in league history.

For all the strides he took in his second pro season, this was not one of them.

Fast forward 14 months. It’s almost March and Siakam isn’t just the favourite for the NBA’s Most Improved Player award, he’s practically a shoo-in.

The 24-year-old has blossomed into one of the league’s premiere young talents, a two-way player and borderline all-star who can beat just about anybody off the dribble or make them look silly with his trademark spin move.

He’s eclipsed his career-high in scoring seven times this season, most recently with a 44-point explosion against Washington earlier this month, and he’s been the most consistent contributor on a team that features Kawhi Leonard and Kyle Lowry.

But the most remarkable thing about his third-year breakout is how quickly he’s turned himself into a capable – and perhaps even better than that – outside shooter.

Siakam hit 49 per cent of his threes in February – 11th-best in the NBA among players that attempted at least 30 – including 12 of his last 16 tries. He’s up to 37 per cent on the season – higher than Damian Lillard, Kevin Durant, James Harden, C.J. McCollum and Kemba Walker, albeit on a fraction of the attempts.

He’s become especially proficient from the corners, where 102 of his 149 three-point attempts have come from. He’s shooting 43 per cent, including 52 per cent (15-for-29) this past month. On the season, only nine players have taken more corner threes than Siakam, yet only one of them – teammate Danny Green – is shooting a better percentage.

Given how hard Siakam works and how rapidly just about every other area of his game has developed – especially considering he’s only been playing organized basketball for eight years – this improvement seemed inevitable. Eventually he was going to extend his range, but if you expected it to happen this quickly you were more optimistic than most.

“Well, I don’t’ know if I saw it coming this far, this fast,” said Raptors head coach and former assistant Nick Nurse, who has worked with Siakam since the forward’s rookie year in Toronto. “You remember me saying, ‘Look, he’s a good shooter, he’s going to start making ‘em.’ I said that a lot early in the year. I know his mechanics are good; they’ve been good here now for 18 months. The work has been there, he does it religiously. He shoots a really, really high percentage in practice. It was just a matter of time, getting comfortable, seeing them go in in a game.”

The evolution of Siakam’s jumper can be traced back to the summer of 2017, just after his rookie campaign. Siakam had opened his first season as a starter and made a quick impression with his speed and unrelenting motor. However, once opposing defences figured him out, he became unplayable. He couldn’t shoot, so teams would essentially ignore him on the perimeter and throw an additional defender at Lowry or DeMar DeRozan.

With that in mind and considering the way in which the league was changing, forcing most big men to reinvent themselves as shooters, the team asked Siakam to work on the three-ball over that off-season.

He had only taken seven threes as a rookie after attempting just 17 in two seasons at New Mexico State. It wasn’t part of his game so it hadn’t been a big part of his routine. That was about to change.

From that point on, Siakam incorporated the three-point shot into his workouts. To this day, he won’t leave the gym until he hits 100 of them.

He also tweaked his mechanics, not drastically, but enough to notice the difference in his release. He’s simplified the process, focusing on catching the ball cleanly, setting his feet and going straight up without much movement in his lower body or his guide hand.

The change didn’t bring immediate results. For the first time in his young career Siakam was firing away, as his coaches instructed, but the shots weren’t falling. The team had to make a call: pull the plug on the experiment or stay the course. In that moment, nobody would have blamed them for choosing the former and telling Siakam to stick to his strengths. But, perhaps to the detriment of the present, they continued to give him the green light, believing it would be best for his – and their – future.

"The pressure to win right now is so severe that you can't live through some of that,” Nurse said. “How can we keep letting this guy keep taking these shots? He's not making them. It's affected the outcome of today’s game.

“[But] to be able to play for us and to play in our offence the way we need to run it, he needs to be able to take 'em. That was part of it. Do we believe in our offence? Yeah. Do we believe our offence is creating the right shots? Yeah. Do we need to have the guys in place that can make those shots? Yes. So we needed to stay with it.”

Siakam didn’t get down on himself, even after watching so many shots rim out, and his teammates never got down on him either. They continued to look for him and encourage him to shoot it if he was open. Former head coach Dwane Casey urged him to focus on the corner three, which is believed to be the most efficient shot in the game. He stayed positive and kept working at it.

“It's a lot of work,” said Lowry, who speaks from experience. He was a 26 per cent three-point shooter over the first four years of his career before turning himself into one of the league’s most accurate marksmen.

“It's a lot of patience. It's a lot of work. It's a lot of consistency. Now that's the biggest thing, is being consistent with the shot and being consistent with the work, because it can take a while. And being patient. You've gotta be patient, you've gotta continue to just shoot your shot. You'll have frustrating days and you'll have frustrating times, but the endgame is bigger.”

“I think before it was just a lot of thinking, a lot of thinking and talking about going through that stretch where I didn’t make a shot for like a month,” Siakam remembers. “So, going through something like that, it’s definitely tough but you have to be strong. And for me to just trust that you’re going to make some shots and you’re going to miss some shots. Right now I’m willing to miss. I don’t care. Before [you take the shot] you have to think, ‘I’m going to make it, I’m going to make it.’ For me, it’s just making sure that I take the right shot and it’s the same mechanics. And [regardless of] the result, I’m just willing to accept it.”

Suddenly, the results are starting to come and the work is paying off, which is a major development for Siakam and his team.

Defences have been slow to adjust to Siakam’s improved three-point shooting. It’s not that they’re unaware of it or disrespecting his range, but the sample size is still relatively small and they’re likely waiting to see if he can keep it up before they elect to close out harder on some of his open looks. Right now, teams seem content to take away his driving lanes.

But if Siakam continues to shoot the ball at or close to this rate, he’ll leave opponents with the classic pick-your-poison dilemma – the type of problem that only the game’s best players present. Crowd them or chase them off the line and they’ll blow right by you, getting to the rim or kicking the ball out to an open teammate. Give them space and they’ll rain threes on you.

"He's made our level of talent rise,” Nurse said. “There's a legitimate force to be reckoned with there that is at a super-high level. Probably the biggest thing that’s changed on the scouting report is it's gone from disrespect, don't guard this guy, he can't hurt us offensively — well, we know that's not the case anymore — to they're gonna have to start making the adjustments. I think it's going to balance things out for everybody else. And I think it has. I think it's made guys a lot more effective. It's been pretty important. It's almost like we added a whole new all-star-type player."

Even without the jumper, Siakam looked to be on the path to stardom. With it, his ceiling gets even higher.​