I need to watch more Spurs games. They haven’t forgotten the art of the midrange jumpers. I don’t have the stats in front of me, but I’m pretty sure I looked it up and remember seeing that LaMarcus Aldridge and DeMar DeRozan are in the top five of midrange shooting. Add in Rudy Gay, who has never forgotten how much he loved to shoot those shots in Memphis, and you have a team where the three best scorers want nothing more than to get about 17 feet from the basket and let it fly.
For a lot of NBA fans, that’s not something that would be enjoyable to watch. But for a growing segment of NBA fans, including me, it’s a refreshing break from teams like the Rockets and Bucks who almost literally never take those shots. Somehow the Warriors actually do shoot a bunch of midrange jimbos because no one can tell Durant what shots to take and what shots not to take.
This is the kind of performance that opened him up to mockery in the past. The main criticism of him in Memphis and Toronto was that all he did was score and that scoring didn’t help his team much because he was inefficient. Well, maybe he still just wants to get buckets, but at least he’s more efficient than he has been in the past. His public image has made a big rebound after that whole “banning boxscores in the locker room because they make him look bad” thing.