Some raw numbers and data to begin with. Robinson is currently third in the entire NBA league in total threes with 216, with only Buddy Hield (225) and James Harden (261) ahead of him. With Duncan 5% and 7% respectfully, more efficient than them at three-point shooting. We can say with great certainty that Robinson is already an elite three-point shooter.

Triples, triples, and more triples

And what 43.8% efficiency from a three-point range looks like can be best seen with his shot chart, which is “Red” in all 3 point areas. I think it’s a pretty good accomplishment when your weakest 3-point shot is “only” 37.93%…

Another piece of information that is perhaps more impressive than previous ones is that Robinson takes 87.7% of all field goals in form of three-pointers! The first following player (who played some relevant number of matches with some respectable minutes) is Ben McLemore, with 83.4%.

Catch and Shoot

The reason why I said that the Duncan is the definition of the term “Catch and Shoot Player” is that out of the 477 triples that he took, as many as 404 come from “Catch and Shoot” actions!

On the previous chart, I have shown 3-point attempts from Catch And Shoot actions, and as you can see, Robinson convincingly leads the league in this aspect, with 51 more shots than Bertans and Covington. And despite so many attempts, he maintains an average of as much as 44.8%!

Handoff

The skill (which is also a type of “Catch and Shoot” action) that allowed him to make such a huge leap in this season, and also the play that makes the Miami Heat such a great offensive team, is the shot from the “Hand Offs”. So, as the name implies, it’s a simple basketball action where one player hands the ball to a teammate who runs past him. If you watched any of Miami’s games or even the highlights, you noticed that this action almost always takes place in such a way that Bam Adebayo hands the ball to Robinson, and also making a pick which Robinson uses and shoots the three-ball immediately.

As you can see in the third graph, Robinson has the most attempts in the entire league from Hand Off actions, 130 of them. And with that he has by far the highest eFG% of all players (who have more than 35 shots in total through the season). This percentage is 68.5%. If you don’t know what eFG% is, the full name of that statistic is “Effective Field Goal Percentage”. The reason why it is called that is that it takes into account the fact that three-point field goals count for three points while normal field goals only count for two points.

The simple formula for calculating this value is (FG2M + 1.5 * FG3M) / FGA. So this huge percentage of 68.5% tells us what we have already stated, Duncan takes a lot of threes, with very high efficiency.

Bam Robinson

Having already touched on the killer duo of Adebayo and Robinson, I looked at who the top three-point shooters in the league were getting passes from. So the Adebayo-Robinson combo is the second most in triples scored, just behind Lillard and McCollum.

In the 11th place, there is a Butler-Robinson combination as well. Since these are not “official” assists but shots hit after a pass from the passer, there is a possibility that the player did not take the shot directly but did some dribbling, so the scored basket was not assisted. But in the case of Robinson, we can pretty certainly say that almost all of them came for the REAL assist, as 95.3% of all Robinson’s three-pointers are assisted!

Zaključak

To conclude this entire post, we can only say how hard work, will, persistence and desire pay off. Because Duncan Robinson was a player who started his college career at Division III college, then moved on to Michigan, where he was not the main star of the team, as shown in the 2018 draft when he was not drafted. After that, he was working on his skill set in the development G-League, where he showed his potential and had an average of 21.4 points with as many as 4.8 threes per game with a 3pt percentage of 48.3% ! He topped that journey with a great transition to the NBA this year and he has shown how he is one of the best shooters in the league.