Have we tried unplugging Thad’s jumper and plugging it back in?

After Thaddeus Young joined the Indiana Pacers, he was a great jump shooter for a short period of time. That has since changed. What happened?

When the Indiana Pacers traded for Thaddeus Young during the 2016 NBA draft, they thought they were finally getting a quality power forward to improve their roster. The season prior, their starting frontcourt was Myles Turner and Ian Mahinmi, two players clearly better suited to play center (sound familiar?). When Thad joined, the team thought they were getting a bruising starting 4 whose defensive versatility and high IQ would make the team better.

What they did not think they were getting was a good shooter. But they got one:

After shooting just 7/30 from three-point range the season prior in Brooklyn, Thad Young was suddenly a reliable shooter for the Indiana Pacers. From the start of the season up until the all-star break, Thad hit 44/111 (39.6%) of his outside shots. That mattered as it turned him into a stretchier four. It gave the team more room to work on offense.

But in early February of that season, Thaddeus Young sprained his wrist on a tough fall. He missed 8 games, and when he returned from his injury he didn’t look the same.

After tossing 2.3 deep bombs per game pre-injury, Thad only took 7 the entire rest of the season, hitting just one. His free throw shooting dipped too – he hit 57.1 percent when healthy and only 39.1 percent the rest of the season. The wrist injury threw him off.

Flash forward two seasons now, and this has had obvious residual effects. Last season, opposing teams still weren’t sure if Thad was a good shooter or not. Pre-injury Thad would make you pay for giving him space, so teams were reluctant to give him any room to shoot during the earlier portions of the 2017-18 season:

He would go on to hit just 32 percent of his outside shots last season, and it was clear that his early season hot stretch from 2016 was not indicative of his actual shooting effectiveness.

Teams have noticed this season, and they are giving Thad all the space he wants when he is outside the three-point arc:

Opponents don’t even close out hard on him anymore. They know that it is overwhelmingly more likely that Young shot fakes the three than he sinks it. Nobody is falling for that this season.

So is Thad just a bad shooter now? Did he finally figure out the whole shooting thing in 2016 only to have an injury ruin his progress? Well, not exactly.

Pre-2016, Thad was… not a great shooter. At all. He was a 31.9% (253/792) three-point shooter before joining the Pacers. That isn’t a bad percentage necessarily, but it isn’t good either.

Using a binomial distribution, we can say that there was only a 1.77% chance that Thad would hit exactly 44 of his first 111 threes that season. That number isn’t so low that you call it a miracle, but it is low enough to say that wasn’t normal shooting for Thad. Was it not normal in that he finally figured out how to be a good shooter? Or was it not normal in that it was a ridiculously hot stretch for a historically below average shooter?

It’s hard to say. I tend to lean with the latter. He made 45 threes from April 14, 2014-April 13, 2016. Two full seasons. 730 days. 45 made three-pointers.

Then he magically hit 44 in 100 days. It was a statistical anomaly that raised his expectations as a shooter and garnered more respect from defenses than Thad deserved. It helped the team quite a bit, but it was not at all indicative of the shooter Thad really is.

And this season, even the non-three-point jumpers are rough. He’s shooting a dismal 20 percent on long 2s. As soon as he steps out double-digit feet from the basket, defenses completely ignore him, and for good reason:

Kent Bazemore doesn’t even pretend to close out on Thad. He would rather remain in good rebounding position than even put a hand in Young’s face from 15 feet. That hurts the Pacers a ton.

Thaddeus Young is still a very solid basketball player. He is a very good defender both inside and out. He is a solid rebounder with a rebound rate over 10 percent. He deflects weak passes. He sets good screens. He is a master of duck-ins – he’s shooting his best percentage from 0-3 feet in a Pacers uniform so far this season.

But his jumper is broken. It just won’t go in anymore. He’s 16/54 on jump shots this season, registering only 36 points. That’s .67 points per shot, atrocious efficiency. Thad either needs to start knocking down some shots or have a better shot selection. His current jumper just isn’t effective.