Russell Westbrook and the Oklahoma City Thunder washed out of the playoffs Tuesday night in a 105-99 Game 5 loss, the last sigh of a frustrating 4-1 series loss to the Houston Rockets. The game followed a familiar script, with the Thunder rushing out to an early lead as Westbrook put a good and thorough thumping on the Rockets defense. But as the game wore on, Westbrook began to tire, the Houston defense began to tighten, and the OKC bench hemorrhaged an enormous number of points. As the Rockets pulled away, the Thunder had no means to make up that ground, because the Thunder cannot shoot.
Oklahoma City’s glaring lack of shooting is nothing new. The team shot just 31.1 percent from 3 in the series, and that’s humiliating, sure, but it’s also not too far off of the Thunder’s regular season average of 32.7. Westbrook himself threw up brick after brick, going 13 for 49 from 3 (26.5 percent), many in the desperate fourth-quarter scrums that always seem to wrap up Oklahoma City’s games. But this paucity of reliable shooters isn’t simply because Kevin Durant left town over the summer and the team traded Serge Ibaka for Victor Oladipo; it’s the result of a yearslong failure of the Thunder to find perimeter players who fit the modern NBA landscape.
For as long as there’s been an NBA analytics movement, the 3-and-D wing player has been one of the atomic units of the mathematically sound game. The role of perimeter defender and long-range specialist isn’t necessarily new. In the generation before Shane Battier was beatified by Michael Lewis in The New York Times Magazine, Bruce Bowen, Rick Fox and Doug Christie were manning the position, and before them, guys such as the Showtime Lakers’ Michael Cooper or the Bad Boy Pistons’ Joe Dumars filled the role. But now the 3-and-D guy is more in focus than ever. Which is why it might be a surprise that there are still relatively few players who fit the description.
Over the last four seasons, the number of players who qualify1 as a 3-and-D (hitting a breakeven 33 percent of their 3s and a defensive Real Plus/Minus of at least 12) has lagged far behind the number of players who fit other traditional roles, such as the rebounding, defensive big man3 or the playmaking point guard.4
| SEASON | 3-AND-D | REBOUNDING BIG | PLAYMAKER PG |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-17 | 20 | 37 | 26 |
| 2015-16 | 11 | 47 | 28 |
| 2014-15 | 18 | 42 | 35 |
| 2013-14 | 15 | 30 | 39 |
The Thunder have had a lot more success finding big men — rebounding defenders like Steven Adams, or players to clean the offensive boards, like Enes Kanter — but such players are far more common than a prototypical 3-and-D guy, and even if they weren’t, a surplus of rebounding isn’t as viable as a surplus of shooting.
Yet while there isn’t an abundance of shooter-defenders, they also aren’t impossible to find for a team that knows where to look. Yes, some like Jimmy Butler, Kevin Durant and LeBron James are simply good at everything. And some, like Portland’s Al-Farouq Aminu, are lottery picks who end up as just role players. But the vast majority of the players who turn out to be 3-and-D studs come from the late-first or second round of the draft, meaning every team has a chance at drafting and developing them. Here are the 20 players who fit the bill this season:
| NAME | POSITION | TEAM | DRAFT # | 3 POINT % | DEFENSIVE REAL +/- |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Robert Covington | SF | Philadelphia | — | 33.3% | +4.3 |
| Al-Farouq Aminu | SF | Portland | 8 | 33.0 | +3.2 |
| Thabo Sefolosha | SF | Atlanta | 13 | 34.2 | +2.4 |
| Jimmy Butler | SF | Chicago | 30 | 36.7 | +2.2 |
| Danny Green | SG | San Antonio | 46 | 37.9 | +2.0 |
| Rudy Gay | SF | Sacramento | 8 | 37.2 | +2.0 |
| Andre Iguodala | SF | Golden State | 9 | 36.2 | +1.8 |
| Patrick Beverley | SG | Houston | 42 | 38.2 | +1.6 |
| Victor Oladipo | SG | Oklahoma City | 2 | 36.1 | +1.6 |
| Solomon Hill | SF | New Orleans | 23 | 34.8 | +1.5 |
| Jae Crowder | SF | Boston | 34 | 39.8 | +1.4 |
| Kevin Durant | SF | Golden State | 2 | 37.5 | +1.4 |
| James Ennis III | SF | Memphis | 50 | 37.2 | +1.4 |
| LeBron James | SF | Cleveland | 1 | 36.3 | +1.4 |
| PJ Tucker | SF | Phoenix/Toronto | 35 | 35.7 | +1.4 |
| Trevor Ariza | SF | Houston | 43 | 34.4 | +1.3 |
| Luke Babbitt | SF | Miami | 16 | 41.4 | +1.2 |
| Khris Middleton | SG | Milwaukee | 39 | 43.3 | +1.1 |
| Manu Ginobili | SG | San Antonio | 57 | 39.2 | +1.1 |
| DeMarre Carroll | SF | Toronto | 27 | 34.1 | +1.0 |
Since the Thunder allowed Thabo Sefolosha to leave via sign-and-trade in 2014, the Thunder have struggled to find perimeter role players who can both shoot from distance and hold their own on defense. This season, Oladipo has taken on Ibaka and Durant’s spacing responsibilities (and beginning next year, much of their salary cap space) while being a worse shooter than either. In past seasons, the Thunder’s meek supporting cast could be somewhat attributed to the luxury of having Durant and Ibaka — both excellent spot-up shooters — which let the Thunder fill out the roster with more specialized (or, to put it less generously, more limited) players thanks to Durant and Westbrook’s versatility. But even that strategy eventually reached its limits late in games, when the Thunder offense would grind down to Durant holding the ball, surrounded by questionable-at-best shooters. And this season the issues have only intensified: The Thunder placed their man on the table above, sure, but only after replacing one of the best players in the league with a baseline role player.
That’s because the few shooters the team has come up with in recent years have all been uniformly bad defenders. Teams can get away with having mediocre defenders who can shoot — think Kevin Love and Channing Frye on the Cavs — but not apocalyptically bad ones. In 2014-15 and 2015-16, the Thunder filled that role with Anthony Morrow, who was the functional counterweight to Andre Roberson, a superb defender who might as well be shooting with his eyes closed. Morrow shot 38.7 from 3 in 2015-16 for the Thunder but was one of the worst defenders in the league, with a defensive RPM of -3.05. This season’s Morrow is Alex Abrines, a 23-year-old out of Spain who shot 38.1 percent from 3 and made the opposing offense 4.3 points better when he was on the court. The maxim might be that a player only needs one elite skill to be useful to an NBA team, but the corollary is that he can’t be among the worst in the league at everything else to be useful to a playoff contender.
These specific deficiencies showed themselves during those late-game panics against the Rockets. The Oklahoma City bench units have been lambasted for their startlingly bad numbers without Westbrook, and the shooters’ inability to play defense is a big reason why. The defense gave up 117.1 points per 100 possessions (-12.1 net) when Abrines shared the floor with Westbrook, and a shocking 147.1 points per 100 (-42.1) when he was paired with Jerami Grant, one of the Thunder’s other sort-of shooters off the bench.
It’s clear that the Thunder roster cannot persist in its current state, and in the first season after losing a player like Durant, certain allowances ought to be made for holes in the team’s roster. But the persistent lack of shooting in Oklahoma City, and the persistent rostering of one-dimensional players in a league run by multidimensional lineups, is reason enough to question whether the problems facing the Thunder are ones the team is capable of overcoming.