(January 6th) It is remarkable the extent to which Silas Demary’s three-point shot has gone from last year being his biggest weakness to this year being a strength. He’s by no means an elite shooter – the volume simply isn’t there for that – but he makes what he does take at a sufficiently high rate that it keeps the defense honest. If someone told us coming into the year that Demary was going to be in the 81st percentile for three-point percent, we’d have been ecstatic.
For Demary, a three-point shot has both direct and indirect implications for his value. Directly, the three-point shot being a credible threat means that his rim attacks become all the more threatening, since defenses cannot in any way sit back now. But indirectly, NBA teams tend to heavily over-punish weak shooters in the draft because it requires them to think, and they don’t like that. Coaches don’t want to have to think about how they adjust their spacing, front offices dont’ want to think about who else they acquire. By shooting the three, Demary avoids committing the biggest sin of all as a prospect – making the GM actually do real work.
(December 12th) Silas Demary’s prospect status has largely been driven by three key things: His defense, his ability to set up others, and his ability to get to the line. His defense, though not statistically as good as last year’s, has still been elite (90th percentile DBPM, 97th percentile in steals) and I suspect the film will show that the statistical difference is a mirage of small sample sizes. His playmaking, similarly, has technically dropped off slightly with the higher turnover rate (57th percentile AST:TOV, 79th percentile true TOV%), but is still a clear and significant positive that I wouldn’t be surprised if the film just showed that the difference in turnover rate was about team context.
His foul-drawing, however, is at absolutely elite levels currently. Compared to guards, the number of players better than Demary at getting to the line (100th percentile FTr) is a rounding error. But here’s the thing – FTr is usually a stat that favors bigs, because there are bigs who just don’t take all that many shots in general. A guard’s 100th percentile might not be all that meaningful, because usually the 100th percentile guard will be approximately the 70th percentile big. Even if we compared Demary to bigs, though, his FTr would still be in the 98th percentile. And because he’s getting to the line so often and converting them so efficiently, he’s also in the 100th percentile for true shooting, the best measure of scoring efficiency. So far, Demary’s foul-drawing has been nothing short of elite even among the elite foul-drawers, and it has paid dividends in terms of his overall effectiveness.