On Shooting, Balance and Comfort

With just under five minutes to play, as the Toronto Raptors hung around early Sunday afternoon against the Miami HEAT, Dwyane Wade split a pair of defenders on a pick-and-roll. As it tends to happen, the second level of defense slid up into the paint to offer help on Wade.

A play later, LeBron James brought the ball up in transition, driving down the right side of the paint. As it tends to happen, another defender slid up to help.

In both instances, with defenders worried about prolific scorers, Mario Chalmers found himself open behind the three-point line, on the receiving end of kick-out passes. In both instances, he made the shot.

As it tends to happen, this season.

Chalmers’ back-to-back threes forced a Toronto timeout and gave the HEAT a 14-point lead, but those two shots weren’t especially remarkable in the grand scheme of things. What is remarkable is what all of the shots like that, added up, are whispering to us about Chalmers.

Which is that Chalmers has been one of the best and most efficient spot-up shooters in the NBA.

First, the basic numbers. Chalmers is 10th in the league in three-point percentage, at 47.1 percent. Among players that have taken at least 100 threes so far this season, Chalmers tops them all – with Ray Allen just out of the running at 92 attempts. Among players with at least 25 spot-up attempts, Chalmers scores the fifth-most points per possession. In unguarded catch-and-shoot situations, Chalmers is scoring an obscene 1.554 points per shot attempt.

On a HEAT team that often struggles with offensive spacing, a shooter like that, who is not only making shots but taking shots whenever the opportunity presents itself to do so, is invaluable. But those numbers will also fluctuate throughout the course of the season, and a cold spell could always be just around the corner.

This is normally where we say that however impressive the results have been, it’s the process that matters most. But with spot-up shooting, it can be difficult to put into words how exactly the process has changed, hence the occasional need for abstract – i.e. unmeasureable – words such as confidence to explain why someone is better at something.

With Chalmers, only one of the two most apt descriptors for his improved shooting is abstract. That one is comfort. The other is balance.

And nowhere has Chalmers’ comfort seemingly increased more than in taking the corner three, a shot he’s making at a 54.1 percent clip, the 11th highest mark in the league (with 10 attempts), which is a 14.1 percent improvement from last season.

“Growing up, and even in college, I hated shooting in the corner,” Chalmers said. “When I first got to the NBA, a lot of my shots came from the corner. I just had to get in the gym and work on it. Me and [Video Coordinator] Dan Craig did a lot of work, and it paid off.”

The reason he hated the corner was because it was strange territory. Chalmers had spent most of his youth as a primary point guard, which meant he was usually working with the ball in his hands. When he passed, he would wait where his teammates had the most available passing lanes in case they didn’t to get the ball back to a shot creator.

“I was always working the top of the key and the wings, I didn’t really venture into the corner too much,” Chalmers said.

As Norris Cole is experiencing right now, that unfamiliarity creates a learning curve for college guards, who enter a league with a plethora of volume scorers and coaches preaching the efficiency of the shorter shot in the corner. It doesn’t mean a shot has to be changed or altered, it just means a shot needs repetitions.

Shots also require healthy bodies, and that’s where balance comes in.

“That’s definitely a big thing,” Chalmers said. “It’s hard to shoot when you’ve got a shoulder problem. Every time you release it, your shoulder is kind of stiff or you tweak it the wrong way and it starts hurting. Being healthy is a big thing. Plus my legs, having my ankle injury, kind of being off balance sometimes, the knee, being off balance.”

It was a common sight in the second half of last season to see Erik Spoelstra, along with assistant coaches, running Chalmers through shooting drills after practice finished. But they weren’t necessarily spot-up drills. Chalmers would catch the ball on the move, take a dribble to one side or the other, and then shoot. But as he took the dribble, Spoelstra would push Chalmers with both hands.

At the time, it seemed Spoelstra was helping Chalmers improve his ability to shoot after absorbing contact – a similar drill he ran Dwyane Wade through earlier in Wade’s career. While that certainly was part of it, the goal wasn’t entirely to make Chalmers an off-the-dribble shooter. It was also to simply work on his balance, to help his ankle and knee stop on a dime and get a shot up with consistent mechanics.

Now that work it’s paying off, and it will continue to do so even when he inevitably starts missing a few more. Not that Chalmers isn’t trying to prevent any hit to his percentages.

“I’m trying not to dip. That’s why I keep working on it. I’m trying to avoid that dip in my percentage,” he said.