With this game, Cam Reddish has officially crawled out from the abyss of shooting below 30% on three-pointers (29.2%) onto the wide and verdant plain of shooting above 30% on three-pointers (30.5%). The abyss was a lonely and terrible place where his only companionship was other bigtime bricklayers like Jae Crowder, Brook Lopez, and Spencer Dinwiddie. By its very nature, the abyss is designed to keep the players within it trapped forever. However, Reddish showed uncommon resiliency in overcoming that infernal place of strife to graduate from being a “poor” shooter to an “adequate” one, and his reward is to stroll leisurely on the sun-dappled paths of the plain.
All signs point to this upward trend continuing for Reddish. That’s not even a hot take because the expectation is that young rookies only improve as they get used to the NBA and all its various intricacies. It would have been kind of interesting in a morbid way if Reddish never improved on his putrid shooting numbers from his first two months in the league, but, in the end, I think it’s more satisfying for everybody if he improves as a player. Besides, we have Jordan Poole around if we want a rookie who can be a target for all of our misdirected hate and disdain.
Now the only thing Reddish has left to do is to drag his shooting percentage to 40% and I’ll OFFICIALLY consider him to be a scorer of acceptable efficiency. He’s shooting 33.5% from the field (okay, 34.3% after this game) so I’m not expecting that to happen this season, barring a sudden and unexpected uptick in midrange ability. But the great thing about the NBA is your shooting percentages reset every season so you can easily be a good shooter one year after being a bad one!