Welcome back to the NBA Hater Report: A breakdown of some of the players, teams and trends around the league that are drawing the ire of yours truly. If you’re not a fellow pessimist, proceed with caution.
One-legged 3-pointers have become a thing in the NBA. I remember when Stephen Curry pulled one out against the Spurs in the second round of the 2013 playoffs when he was on a postseason heater and he could’ve shot left handed and justified it. He made that shot, by the way. Everyone laughed. It was just part of the Curry experience. It wasn’t something anyone thought they would ever seen on any sort of a regular basis.
And as a rule, that’s held true. Victor Wembanyama has tossed up a few. Trae Young and LeBron James will do it from time time to time. But the exception to this rule is LaMelo Ball, who basically now takes all of his step-back 3s off one foot. Seriously. Pretty much all of them (and a handful of others off any kind of dribble) look like some version of this:
And this …
And this …
And this …
And this …
For the most part Ball still takes his catch-and-shoots off two feet, but he’s not immune to firing up one-leggers in this context, either.
Now listen, I’m not going to be the get-off-my-lawn traditionalist that says you have to do everything by the instructional manual. In fact, I’m the opposite of that. Doing anything because “that’s the way it has always been done” is a fool’s logic. That’s true in all of life, and it’s certainly true in sports, where you have to ask hard questions about the way things have always been done and challenge tradition and ultimately to the things that work best for you in your context. Nobody played like Stephen Curry until Stephen Curry. Half the shots he takes would be considered awful shots by traditional standards. I don’t care about tradition.
What every basketball player should care about are results, and in Ball’s case, they’re not good. So far the Hornets star is making just 28% of his 3s, and specifically he’s 7 for 27 (25.9%) on step-backs according to NBA.com tracking and 27.5% on all of-the-dribble 3s.
He really started doing this last year. The “pull-up jump shot” tracking classification encapsulates most of the non-step-back off-the-dribble 3s and Ball was 28% on those last year. He typically does it when he is already moving in a direction that it makes the release more rhythmic or when he needs to create space to get off a cleaner shot, but for a guy who already struggles to shoot consistently to have inconsistent form seems, shall we say, less than ideal.
Never mind the optics of it. Here you have this free-wheeling player who already has circus-act aspects of his game, and he’s launching up H-O-R-S-E shots as a matter of routine and barely making any of them, relatively speaking.
None of this is meant to suggest Ball isn’t a good player. He’s outrageously talented. The Hornets are actually a plus team when he’s on the floor this season and have gotten worse when he leaves the floor in each of the last five seasons. Some of that is because the Hornets haven’t had very many good players in Ball’s time there, but he’s probably not the losing player he’s made out to be if he ever ends up in a winning situation. Although that remains to be seen.
What we do know about Ball to this point in his career is he hasn’t been even a league-average 3-point shooter since his third year in the league and he’s gotten significantly worse in each of the last three seasons, bottoming out so far this year. And now he’s jacking up one-leggers like he’s in the driveway.
Warriors turning their season over
There was a time when the Warriors could throw the ball all over the arena and it didn’t matter because they had enough firepower to overcome their many and oftentimes ridiculously careless mistakes. That is not the case anymore.
These Warriors are small and athletically inferior to most opponents. When Stephen Curry is off the floor they basically have no offense. Even when he’s on the floor they’re not that great. To win, these Warriors have to actually take care of the margins. Specifically, they have to take care of the ball.
Instead, they’re fumbling it around like it’s lathered in grease, turning it over two more times per game than last season and on 16.2% of their total possessions — the fourth-worst mark in the league per Cleaning the Glass. It is absolutely the difference between them winning and losing games, and Steve Kerr knows it.
“I have zero doubt that the number one thing keeping up from winning consistently is out turnovers,” Kerr recently said. “Zero doubt. The numbers show it. The tape shows it. … If there is one thing that ie keeping us from winning more games, it’s the turnovers. Make no mistake.”
Kerr is right. The Warriors are 10-1 this season when they win or tie the turnover battle, and they are 1-9 when they lose it. In other words, there is, at least so far, almost a 100% guarantee that they will win the game if they manage to commit fewer turnovers than their opponent, and they just can’t bring themselves to do it more than half the time. That’s going to make you a .500 team.
Understand, the Warriors play a style that invites turnovers. They anticipate openings and push pace and throw needle-threading passes, all of which comes at a heightened level of risk. When it works, the rewards look beautiful. Back-door layups. Slips to the basket. Transition and early offense buckets. But when it goes bad, it goes really bad. So far this year it’s been too much bad, and it’s costing the Warriors big time.
Every Clippers loss is OKC’s gain
The Clippers have gone from one of the offseason’s supposed biggest winners to one of the biggest losers in the league. They’re 5-15. They’ve lost 15 of their last 17, with their only two wins in that stretch coming against the Hornets and Mavericks, two of the only teams actually worse than the Clippers.
There’s been a lot of talk about injuries. Sure. Bradley Beal is out for the season and Kawhi Leonard is, well, playing about as often as he usually plays. Derrick Jones Jr. has missed some time, too. Fine. That is the sort of absence every team in the league deals with.
But even when Leonard has played the Clippers have stunk. They’re 3-7 in the 10 games he’s played and minus-8.6 points per 100 possessions when he’s on the floor. James Harden is having a terrific season and it doesn’t mean a thing. He’s getting frustrated, too. How long until this guy demands a trade?
None of this would matter beyond the Clippers being a very expensive mess if they didn’t owe the defending champion Thunder their 2026 first-round pick. But they do. And it’s unprotected. In a class that is so talented that Yahoo’s Kevin O’Connor recently cited some league executives that believe Cooper Flagg wouldn’t go any higher than third had he not reclassified and was still set to become draft eligible next summer.
Now the Thunder are going to get that pick? Think about the ramifications of that on a league-wide scale. This is an almost unfairly deep and talented team. And just when it’s about to start getting too expensive to keep together, along comes a lower-paid standout like Ajay Mitchell and Aaron Wiggins on a clearance-rack contract … and now this almost-certain lottery pick coming from the Clippers next season.
As it looks right now, the Clippers could have a legit shot at a top-three pick. If the Thunder go back-to-back, which at this point they look poised to do, and also have a top-three pick in this 2026 class, the Clippers will have screwed every team in the league beyond their own disastrous season.
Let’s not even get into the fact that OKC also own Utah’s 2026 pick if it ends up outside the top eight.
The 76ers didn’t have to sign Joel Embiid to a three-year, $193 million extension last September. He still had two years on left on his what is his current deal, including a player option in 2026-27. They could’ve, and clearly should’ve, waited to see how his health was going to play out for as long as they could. They might’ve been out of the Embiid business as soon as this summer if he didn’t want to pick up that player option. But now they could be paying him $67.4 million three years from now.
I’ve seen some Sixers fans suggesting Embiid deserves this money even if he can’t play anymore, literally, given all he’s done for the franchise. Excuse me? He’s never been healthy enough to take the Sixers past the second round. We’re not talking about Kobe’s last thank-you deal with the Lakers here. Embiid was a great player in his prime, obviously, but not even close, ultimately, to meaningful enough to “deserve” this kind of equity cash out.
The only way Embiid is worth this money is if he’s at least somewhat valuable enough on the court to justify it, and that just isn’t the case and there’s no reason to believe it ever will be again. Embiid’s played in seven games this season. Seven. The latest being Philly’s loss to Atlanta on Sunday in which Embiid was a minus-11 for the game.
Even if he still serves a diminished offensive purpose as a two-man partner with Maxey, midrange scorer and post presence to attract occasional double teams (to whatever degree the Sixers want to grind their possessions down by playing through him), he cannot be any sort of focal point and cannot jump over a phonebook to rebound, and he cannot, and does not, move at all defensively.
When Embiid has been on the floor, the Sixers have posted what would ranked as the second-worst defensive rating in the league, per Cleaning the Glass.
Now add to this Paul George’s disastrous deal, which is set to pay him $54.1 million next season and potentially $56.6 million the year after that, and yeah, the Sixers’ books are absolutely cooked for the foreseeable future for two guys who have played a total of 12 games this season and just one actually together.
The George deal, at least, made sense to most people at the time. The Embiid extension didn’t have to happen when it did. The Sixers could have collected more information. They are going to regret not doing that for quite some time.
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