Wally Szczerbiak’s game looks tailor-made for the NBA’s current shot diet.
The former Timberwolves forward came into the league as the sixth overall pick in the 1999 NBA Draft, selected by Minnesota out of Miami (OH). He spent his first six seasons with the Wolves before being dealt to the Boston Celtics midway through his seventh year.
Back then, Szczerbiak was already doing the thing modern offenses crave most: stretching the floor. He was a reliable long-range shooter in Minnesota and across his NBA career, but the era he played in never really gave him the kind of green light that would have turned that skill into a bigger weapon.
Bleacher Report’s list of the top 99 NBA shooters ever, released Thursday, included Szczerbiak at No. 66.
That placement is subjective, of course, and sure to stir debate. Still, it’s easy to picture how dangerous he might have been if he’d been asked to launch 8-10 threes a night.
With the Timberwolves, Szczerbiak was a steady scoring option, often working as the No. 2 behind Kevin Garnett. He made the All-Star Game in the 2001-02 season and averaged 15.5 points during his Minnesota run.
The shooting numbers are what really jump off the page. Szczerbiak hit 40.4 percent of his 3-point attempts with the Wolves, which is an elite mark by any standard.
But he wasn’t taking nearly enough of them to match the volume of today’s game. He averaged fewer than 1.9 attempts from deep per game in Minnesota, and his high-water mark over his first six seasons was 2.8 tries per game.
In 40 games before the trade to Boston, he took 3.6 threes per game.
That contrast gets even sharper when you line up the eras. In 2002-03, when Szczerbiak was at 2.8 attempts per game, NBA teams averaged 14.7 3-point tries a night.
Last season, that number was 37.0. Put Szczerbiak’s 2002-03 workload into today’s environment, and he’d be clearing seven attempts per game.
He also finished strong from deep after those first two seasons, making 41.6 percent of his threes with Minnesota the rest of the way. Szczerbiak was a good player in his own time. In the NBA now, he might have been even more valuable.
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