I spent Election Day doing what any reasonable basketball obsessive would do: I went back through every three-point attempt Rudy Gobert has taken in his 14-year NBA career.
And the numbers don’t quite add up.
Gobert is not 0-for-28 from deep. He’s 0-for-27. The NBA’s official play-by-play data has one extra miss on his ledger, and it traces back to Jan. 24, 2015, when the Jazz beat the Kevin Garnett-led Nets 108-73 in Salt Lake City.
That night, Gobert came off the bench for 20 minutes, scored six points and pulled down 12 rebounds. In the third quarter, with the shot clock running down, Derrick Favors spun in the lane and found Gobert in the short corner.
Gobert took one dribble, went up for a hook shot from about four feet, and Mason Plumlee blocked it. Gobert got the rebound and tried to toss up another jumper, but the clock expired.
Somehow, that sequence got logged as a three-point attempt.
It wasn’t close to a three. After going back through the game, every shot Gobert took in those 20 minutes came from inside the arc.
So the record should read 0-for-27 from three for his career, not 0-for-28. In the regular season, that’s 0-for-24, not 0-for-25.
If the NBA corrects the error and Gobert hits his next three, his career three-point percentage would be 3.6% - 1 for 28 - instead of 3.4% - 1 for 29.
The mistake matters because Gobert’s long-range attempts have become a small but increasingly visible part of his game. Last season, he launched a career-high five threes.
Through seven games this season, he’s already taken three. That puts him on pace for about 33.
“It’s not something we’re going to lean into,” Timberwolves coach Chris Finch said Tuesday on KFAN’s Paul Allen Show of Gobert taking more threes. “There are times at the end of the shot clock when he’s always going to have a clean look.
He does work very hard on it; he’s been working on it for years. He just hasn’t connected on it in a game.
… It’s not something that we are encouraging at a high level, but if it happens from time to time in the flow of the game, and it makes sense at that point in time, it’s better to get a shot up [than commit a shot clock violation].”
That’s the lane for Gobert: not a featured part of the offense, but a release valve when the clock is dying and the ball finds him out on the perimeter.
His three-point line is ugly, but it looks even worse when you account for how many of those attempts were desperation heaves. Twelve of his 27 career threes have come from at least half-court in the closing seconds of a quarter.
The league’s new heave rule, introduced last season, keeps shots launched in the final three seconds of the first three quarters from at least 36 feet from counting against a player’s stats. If that rule had existed since Gobert’s rookie season in 2013-14, he’d be 0-for-16 from deep.
That’s still not exactly pretty. But it’s a lot less brutal than the raw total.
Gobert’s work on the shot is easy to understand. He’s 34, and with fellow countryman Victor Wembanyama in the league, he’s probably not going to add a fifth Defensive Player of the Year trophy. Big men have extended careers by stretching the floor before, and the examples are all over the last decade-plus.
Brook Lopez took just seven threes over his first six seasons. Then in 2018-19, his first year with the Bucks, he fired 512 and is still playing at 38.
Blake Griffin didn’t average even one three-point attempt per game until his eighth season, then got all the way to seven a night in 2018-19 with Detroit. Marc Gasol didn’t attempt more than 17 total threes in a season until he was 32; that year he took 268 and played five more seasons.
Pau Gasol followed suit, adding a steady three-point shot in 2016-17 and knocking them down at a 53.8% clip at age 36.
Gobert is an elite defender in remarkable shape in his mid-30s, but he probably isn’t about to become a real three-point threat. And given that he’s a 63.1% free-throw shooter, the Wolves probably aren’t exactly eager to let him start letting it fly.
Still, the first make feels inevitable. When it happens, the NBA should make sure the stat line reflects it correctly.
One less miss for Rudy Gobert. One more fix for the league.
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