Basketball’s funky shots

As basketball thinking drifts away from two-point shots that aren’t layups or dunks, Purdue’s three leading scorers all rely on mid-range craftiness to help make the Boilermakers a deadly offensive team.

“Our three best offensive players, they do a great job working on their games,” assistant coach P.J. Thompson. “We’re analytics-minded in our approach but as I told Coach Painter a few years back, ‘We’d be crazy not to let Braden Smith shoot 15-foot jump shots. It’s one of his best shots.'”

It’s those running, downhill, step-back fadeaways that Smith shoots that are so effective but also can look so antithetical to modern shot-profiling philosophy. The same can be said for those high-arching H-O-R-S-E-contest runners Fletcher Loyer shoots off the dribble and those shot-put-looking short-roll one-handers Trey Kaufman-Renn has terrorized defenses with all season.

Common denominators: All three juniors are really adept at making those shots and have worked diligently on them. Also, all three shots are counter-mechanisms to superior size and/or athleticism, a necessity for this Boilermaker team against certain matchups. They’re also a window into the sort of savvy, self-awareness and work ethic that have meant so much to Purdue.

BRADEN SMITH’S FALLAWAY JUMPER

Braden Smith didn’t need to do this stuff in high school. He was faster and more athletic than everyone he’d go head to head with, so he didn’t need workarounds as much against bigger, longer defenders. On the rare occasions he did have disadvantages to overcome while at Westfield High School, far more often than not he could simply outsmart said defender and their whole team.

At Purdue, though, the bodies changed, as did the level of effort and scouting. Particularly last season when his coaches implemented more ball-screen offense for him and Zach Edey — one of the key moves to elevating that team to Final Four status; Smith needed to deepen his bag of tricks.

Enter that step-back jumper offset from the rim, normally shot at something close to full speed.

“I’m not the tallest player on the court and normally I have a taller, more athletic defender on me, so my best chance is to get away and work on a shot that can’t get blocked very often,” Smith said. “I’ve put a lot of time into that.”

The step-back is meant to eliminate the possibility that a trailing defender chasing Smith off a ball screen can catch up to block the shot. When a big man comes out to challenge the shot, first off, good luck, as that’s a lot of ground to cover and second, Smith has shown he can pass out of his delivery, sometimes at the absolute final instant.

While there are hints of James Harden footwork and Luka Doncic mechanics on those shots, Smith — a compulsive basketball consumer — says he’s drawn inspiration from budding NBA superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s toolkit as a scorer, as well as Chris Paul’s veteran savvy in using his body, lateral dribbles and footwork. Paul’s one of the great on-the-move mid-range shooters ever.

“I watch a lot of basketball. I’m pretty not normal when it comes to that. I watch an unbelievable amount,” Smith said. “Shai is out there dropping 50 some nights. Why wouldn’t you watch somebody like that? Same for (Steph) Curry with three-point shooting, coming off ball screens. I’d watch that and slowly see where his feet are, hand placement, things like that, and just try to pick things up from that.”

Smith’s work ethic has made him what he is, and his implementation of that fallaway jumper reflects it.

“It starts with imagination, just me in my head,” he said of his basketball process. “I’d always to go to the gym in high school and picture in my head, ‘OK, I”m playing against Carmel (High School) and they’re gonna guard me super close and it’s gonna be a tough battle. Can I make these tough shots?’ So I’d just take those shots and keep shooting them. You work on it on your own, you work on it in the back yard, on a mini-hoop, whatever.”

According to Synergy Sports, Smith has made 44 two-point jumpers off the dribble this season, shooting a rock-solid 46.3 percent on them. Many of them have been of that downhill fadeaway variety.

When asked, Smith couldn’t really, or didn’t really, deconstruct the how of the shot. It just became natural through repetition to the point the nuts and bolts just kind of fell into place.

“I’m just a basketball player,” Smith said, “and I put a lot of time into my craft and that shot. It’s just about trusting myself and my ability and all the time I’ve put in.”

TREY KAUFMAN-RENN’S SHORT ROLL RUNNER

On the very first day of formal preseason practice Trey Kaufman-Renn‘s freshman year at Silver Creek High School in Sellersburg, he broke his left hand, an ominous start to what wound up being a legendary high school career.

But those first few weeks while his older teammates practiced, the freshman was pushed to the side to spend his time shooting with only his right hand, an origin story of sorts for the shot he’s thriving with during his third year at Purdue and first as its focal-point frontcourt scorer.

Back during those early high school days, Kaufman-Renn never in a million years would have figured that right-handed shooting work would factor seven years later into him being the leading scorer on a top-10-ranked college basketball team and the highly effective wing man for an All-America point guard in pick-and-roll settings.

That’s precisely what he’s been, a deserving All-America candidate who’s averaging 18.9 points on 60-percent shooting this season. True to Purdue’s modern identity offensively, much of that scoring has come in the low post, but a meaningful chunk has come, too, on those eight- or nine-foot one-handers from just inside the foul line.

Synergy categorizes these shots as “runners” and has Kaufman-Renn making 56 percent of them and Purdue averaging a sparkling 1.13 points per possession when he shoots them.

That work off to the side helped Kaufman-Renn make those one-handed righty shots normal, as did the Horse Shoe shooting drill his high school would use in practice, an exercise that begins with layups at the rim, then extends out further with each station.

Such work has helped his hook shot, also. It’s a bit unconventional that Kaufman-Renn tends to square his shoulders to the rim on what his generally a more over-the-shoulder shot.

“When you get so many of those to go in, it just becomes natural,” Kaufman-Renn said. “
“It’s just a touch shot. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

FLETCHER LOYER’S HIGH-ARCHING TEAR DROPS

The product of a family full of both coaches and players, Fletcher Loyer‘s finest skill is his three-point marksmanship. But his most unique skill is his weaponization of those high-arching, quasi-euro and kind of funny-looking runners Purdue wants him looking for when attacking closeouts or on baseline in-bound plays.

“Coach emphasized to me when I first got here, ‘When you get an angle, that’s a shot we want you taking,'” Loyer said.

Loyer has been to shoot that ball with his right hand after jumping off his left, thus the inside-out look of it.

With just 2:34 left in Purdue’s narrow win over Indiana a few games ago, Purdue was down one, subbing Loyer in and out on an offense-defense basis. It ran a BLOB play simply to get Loyer to a baseline runner, which he threw high up in the air before taking contact. It fell through the net for an and-one and the Boilermakers never trailed again.

He’s worked on such shots his whole life. His father, Jon, is a long-time college and NBA coach and his older brother Foster a former player at Michigan State and Davidson.

“I always played up (with older players) playing with my brother,” said Loyer. “It was always his middle school or high school teammates, so I had to make it up somewhere. Those floaters were something we’d always practice when I went to the gym with my brother and my dad.”

“When you’re a little bit limited in terms of not being able to go up and dunk the ball, you have to finish in other ways. It’s just about finding ways when I have an advantage to get it up off the glass or get it up over the big man that’s helping.”

Synergy considers such shots by Loyer as “dribble jumpers” and has Purdue averaging just under a full point per possession when they’re involved. The Loyer runner is a staple of Purdue’s dribble-handoff actions and baseline in-bound playbook.

Statistically, Purdue has not been a great offensive rebounding team, as it’s been in the past, but a significant percentage of its second-chance opportunities have been produced by the sorts of two-point shots taken as a result of actions that have broken down the defense.