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How Kemba Walker Fixed His Shot and Became an Elite NBA Point Guard
- Updated: December 20, 2016
The NBA is filled with countless examples: Rajon Rondo, Ricky Rubio and Derrick Rose are inarguable liabilities from deep. Russell Westbrook—a career 30.4 percent three-point shooter—may experience a harsh fall from grace once his athleticism declines.
The Denver Nuggets, Boston Celtics, and Orlando Magic have to be questioning whether Emmanuel Mudiay, Marcus Smart and Elfrid Payton can respectively steer a dominant attack while defenders routinely dip beneath screens to muck up the offense.
Kemba Walker is officially no longer in that company.
His career changed when the Charlotte Hornets hired Bruce Kreutzer. A coach for nearly 40 years, he arrived before the 2015-16 season to help players boost their shooting percentages. And Walker was the organization’s priority target.
They initially met right after a workout, where Kreutzer filmed the franchise point guard taking jump shots. He concluded that in order for Walker to have a more direct line to the basket, he should move his shot pocket over just a bit. Walker now refers to this change as “the biggest [adjustment] of my career,” and positive results quickly followed: He upped his three-point percentage from 30.4 to 37.1 and averaged over 20 points for the first time.
Charlotte’s offense also cracked the top 10 after ranking 28th in 2014-15.
Walker knocked down just 31.8 percent of his threes through his first four seasons, a dreadful stat compounded by his number of attempts—he was the worst high-volume outside shooter in the league by a fairly wide margin during that stretch. In most cases, a wart that noticeable never disappears.
But it has.
“Being able to shoot the perimeter shot, whether it be a two or a three, certainly opens up the floor,” Kreutzer said. “And knowing that, people have to close out on him now, get up into him. And with his ability and his speed and quickness he goes by people and creates a lot of havoc for other teams.”
The floodgates have opened this season. Walker is shooting 41.4 percent beyond the arc on a robust 6.4 attempts per game. (Walker is one of four players in the league to pass those marks, and Kyle Lowry is the only player in the Eastern Conference who’s made more threes.)
Like Matthew McConaughey’s unthinkable journey from Fool’s Gold to True Detective, Walker renovated his reputation and altered the arc of his career in a way nobody saw coming.
“Honestly, I’ve never been a numbers guy until I got to this league. That’s all anybody talks about, numbers and percentages and stuff like that,” Walker told Bleacher Report.
“I’ve never been that way, especially in my first couple years in the league. But as far as my numbers not getting better at one point, I always felt like I was getting better. I’m a really patient guy, so I know that it takes time to get better, and I’ve been like that throughout my whole basketball career.”
But extended range by itself doesn’t explain why Walker’s sixth season is almost guaranteed to feature his first All-Star appearance. After every game and shootaround, he sits down to watch 15-20 film clips with Hornets assistant coach Steve Hetzel. The two study several aspects of Walker’s game, particularly pick-and-roll action, where the 26-year-old makes navigating the complicated layers of NBA defense look easier than ordering an Uber.
“It makes everyone’s job easier because now he can shoot it really well,” Hornets center Cody Zeller told Bleacher Report. “It opens …
