Dirk Nowitzki is having the best three-point shooting season of his career. If that tidbit was too obscure for you, here’s another one: he’s really old. Those two facts are an unusual combo in the NBA.
There was a point in his career, right around when I really started caring about the NBA, that he was hardly taking any threes at all. He was shooting them well, at 42 percent, just like this year, but he wasn’t even making 1 per game, and he ended up taking only 121, his lowest total other than his rookie season. I sort of assumed that he was done shooting them and would be a more midrange/interior player for the rest of his career. That was a bad assumption. Obviously, as players get older, they start to appreciate that they can still be valuable while simply hanging out behind the arc and waiting for passes to come their way.
I’m not saying that’s what Dirk does every game. But he does it sometimes. And you can’t blame him. He was decently athletic in his earlier days, but now, now he can only move a little bit, and only when he really feels like it.