Steph, KD and the NBA’s best shooters of the past 25 years

Kirk Goldsberry (@kirkgoldsberry) is a professor and an NBA analyst for ESPN.

The NBA has been around for 75 years (by its official accounting), and shooting has always been one of the most important skills in basketball. But for the first 50 years of the league’s history, the only way to measure quality shooting was whether a shot went in or out. That changed in the 1996-97 season, when the NBA began recording new kinds of shooting data collected by the NBA’s official scorekeepers.

This year the NBA is celebrating its 75th anniversary, but a lesser milestone is the 25th anniversary of the NBA’s play-by-play database, which has given us a far greater understanding of the shooting tendencies of the world’s best players. We now know where on the court they prefer to shoot from and how far they can consistently and successfully let it fly.

As we celebrate this anniversary, we map out the best outside shooters — apologies to at-the-rim dominators like Shaquille O’Neal, LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo — starting with the face of the NBA’s shooting revolution, the baby-faced assassin from the Bay Area.

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