https://youtu.be/q4YzSi9V9cQ
Even though the league is still chucking threes at an unprecedented rate (it seems like every night there’s a team setting a franchise high in made threes), I feel like the midrange is making a bit of a comeback. But this is just my gut feeling. It’s very possible that if I were to look at the stats, I would be horribly mistaken, and that only one midrange jumper has been taken by any team this entire season, and it was a brick by Dwayne Bacon in the first minute of Orlando’s season opener before Adam Silver personally came in and demoted him to Russia forever, making sure that the players knew how the NBA was going to be played from now on.
So maybe players and teams aren’t really taking more middy jimbos than previous years. But at the very least, players aren’t openly mocked for taking them by nerds. Nerds who push their coke-bottle glasses up their nose, take a big mucusy sniff, cackle in an extremely grating way, nasally intone “wow, a midrange jumper, what is this, two-thousand and three?”, cackle again, and think about how they have never seen, much less touched, a naked female tit. For real, it seemed like there was a moment in time where any player who made a habit of shooting anything other than threes or layups would be disdained by the blogosphere. And Daryl Morey.
My personal dedication to the art of the midrange should be known; if you haven’t watched my vids of all of Kevin Durant’s midrange jumpers from the 2018-19 season, you totally should right now. And my dedication extends beyond the realm of internet highlight videos. When I drag my frail and relatively uncoordinated body onto the court for some pickup (something that hasn’t happened for a while now, frickin’ COVID), the midrange is how I like to do my damage. These scrubs don’t even realize it’s possible to shoot from there, they’re too busy jacking threes like they’re one of the Curry bros, so they definitely don’t expect me to camp out there and feast.
All those paragraphs are leading to the point I want to make: that I like Patrick Williams because he’s willing and able to shoot from the midrange. Some of the shots he takes there seem like kind of tough shots for a rookie, but again: WILLING. Who cares if he can make the shots or not? The first step to being a midrange assassin is too shoot shots like you’re a midrange assassin. And with the Bulls being bad (again, who could’ve possibly seen this coming), the path forward is clear: mold Williams into a nice number-two scorer behind Zach LaVine but ahead of Lauri Markkanen. Or trade LaVine and make him the number-one scorer. Whatever. As long as they don’t win too many games while doing it.