Are Shooters Today Better?

Are they really better today?

3pt statistics today lead people to believe that the 3pt shooters from earlier years were not as good. Here, we will explore the inaccuracies of that idea.

A common idea is that the players today are so much better than the players in the past at 3-pointers.
Many fans today act like there were no great shooters before, or that today’s shooters are so much better than shooters before. This is not true. The phrase “great shooting environments” is a good one, and accurate for this kind of discussion. It’s not so much the individual on these 3pt shots, more so than the environment they are shooting in. Most of the shooters are similarly skilled in a broad sense, that is if you look across the board, the percentages for NBA 3pt shots today is 35-45%, which is just a shot attempt or two in variation per game. This is NOT to say that certain players are not better shooters individually than others, but overall they are a lot closer than the way they are perceived. Curry is certainly great, but the difference between he and Kyrie, or Dame, or Kerr, or Hodges, etc. is not much.