Just How Bad Of A Shooter Is Michael Carter-Williams?

It’s been no secret that Michael Carter-Williams‘ bread and butter as an offensive asset doesn’t come from his ability to knock down the jumper, and that dates back to his days at Syracuse. When you look at his overall field goal percentage of 40.5 percent, it doesn’t seem that his shooting touch is too glaring of an issue, but after taking a further look at his shooting preferences and how high of a clip he hit’s his jumpers at, it becomes clear just how bad of shooter Carter-Williams was as a rookie.

Let’s go ahead and start with where MCW loved to throw shots up from, and saw very inefficient success as a result with the three-point line. On the season, Carter-Williams launched an overwhelming 208 shots from beyond the arc, which is the kind of freedom Brett Brown should have never given the “pass-first” rookie point guard.

But of those 208 looks, he knocked down only 55, which is a tremendously terrible ratio for someone who looked as if there was no issue of confidence from deep. This made for a season average of 26.4 percent, which is something that desperately needs to increase if MCW is looking to become a more well-rounded floor general.

But his shots from deep weren’t the only ones that brought about a cause for concern. As you can see in the chart above, his looks from inside the top of the key and to each side of it are far from ideal as well. Of the three spots in red right inside of the perimeter, Carter-Williams shot no more than 31 percent from each and shot a horrid 30 percent from that general area as a whole, despite still heaving up 114 jump shots.

His two zones in green right inside of the perimeter can be deceiving as his did hit 18 of his attempts, but 24 shots is a pretty small sample size to judge his great percentage from that area.

In the area just outside of the paint and right inside the free throw line, his numbers improve, but it didn’t seem to be an area of too much interest for Carter-Williams as he shot only 140 shots, but understandably so with this being an area that is primarily dominated by post scorers.

But where the greatest cause for concern comes is by way of some extreme inefficiency around the rim by the reigning Rookie of the Year. With more than half of his shots coming in the immediate area surrounding the rim with 568 attempts, Carter-Williams was able to only convert on 268 opportunities. This leaves 300 shots around the rim that he failed to cash in on, which shows a complete lack of consistency in his ability to finish and at 6’6″, this shouldn’t be such an issue as MCW should have the length to finish over many defenders without much difficulty.

But this isn’t the case. Instead, he struggles around the basket just as he does with the majority of his areas of focus as a shooter. For example, just refer back to the shot chart above. Of the 14 charted shooting zones, Carter-Williams shot below the league average (red) in a whopping nine of them. In fact, the only areas where he was above the league averages (green) were right inside the corners of the perimeter, where he shot 18 of 24, as I mentioned earlier.

There’s no question that these are numbers that any scorer would be ashamed to show off, but than again, it would be hard to label MCW as a true scorer. Rather, he was forced into the roll of a scorer with some absolute freedom from a first-year head coach on a roster that was completely incapable of competing.

We will expect both the shot selection and shooting percentages to increase for MCW in his second season, but that’s with noting that it would be hard to get much worse. Additionally, with a roster that could be even worse than it was during it’s 19-63 campaign of last season, Carter-Williams taking a step back as a shooter simply isn’t an option for head coach Brett Brown and his Sixers.

This isn’t a fix that’s going to become evident overnight, or even a few months, but the 76ers’ faithful would hope that same shot chart will have a few more areas filled in with yellow and green by the time the 2014-15 seasons draws to a conclusion.