“Klay Thompson hasn’t fallen off, he’s just taking the toughest shots of his NBA career!”: Statistic shows why the Warriors’ sharpshooter is shooting a career-low 3-point percentage

Warriors’ Klay Thompson is shooting the career-lowest percentage from the deep this season, and this may be the reason why

The Golden State Warriors can’t seem to shake their injury bug. They’ve been struggling with injuries of sorts since the start of their dynasty, but it reached the peak when Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson both had major injuries during the 2019 NBA Finals.

After two and a half years of rehabbing through two major injuries, Klay Thompson finally made his way back to the floor for the Warriors on 9th January 2022. However, Draymond Green was ruled out then with a lower back injury. Once Green returned, Stephen Curry suffered a lower leg injury, just after one game for the trio together.

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Despite being out for two and a half years, Klay Thompson is not putting up bad numbers. He’s averaged 18 points, 3 rebounds, 2.7 assists in the 26 games he’s played. However, the one thing that has been bothering people is his career-low 3-point shooting percentage.

This season Klay Thompson is taking the most difficult shots of his career

In the 2021-22 NBA season, Klay Thomspon is shooting just 36.1% from the deep. This is the first time in his 11-year career(9, if you take out the two years he was sidelined with injury), that Klay is shooting under 40% from the deep.

Coming back from 2.5 years of injuries, Klay Thomspon was sure expected to be rusty. While that did show in the first few games, Klay let loose and started shooting well for a little bit. However, with Draymond Green out, Klay wasn’t getting the kind of looks he was used to. That did not stop him from shooting, but the conversion rate of shot into a basket was low. When Green returned, Steph got injured, so yet again making the defense focus more on Klay, reducing his shot quality.

According to a statistics website named BBall Index, Klay has a 19.7 percentile shot quality. That means he’s only getting shots better than 19.7% of the players in the league.

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In the past, the lowest shot quality percentile Klay has ever gotten is 43.8% during the 2018-19 season. There is more than a 2x differential in the numbers!

What all this tells us is that Klay, while he may still have some rust, isn’t the one at fault here. As soon as the Dubs get their pieces back and the offense set, we can expect his shot to go back to normal.