Russell Westbrook has been shooting below 10% from beyond the arc ever since All-Star break ended for the Los Angeles Lakers.
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The Los Angeles Lakers have played 9 games since the All-Star break. They have lost 7 of them. The only two games that they have won saw LeBron James drop 50+ points in the bout. Russell Westbrook on the other hand, has been struggling mightily ever since the All-Star break and well, all throughout the season.
Adding a drive-and-dish guy to a roster that doesn’t have guys who can convert on the dish isn’t exactly a formula for winning. The Lakers have not one, but two of these guys in Russell Westbrook and LeBron James, making their co-existence on the roster redundant.
The purple and gold frankly don’t need essentially a smaller version of LeBron who shoots worse from 3-point land and the mid-range. Lauded for his solid mid-range for years, Russ has finally begun to see a regression in this aspect of his game as well, shooting merely 38% from this range.
Russell Westbrook and his lowly 3-point shooting following the All-Star break.
For the second year in a row, Russell Westbrook was not named an All-Star. This meant he got more than a week’s worth of days off from playing NBA basketball. This might’ve not been the best thing for Russ as his last 9 games since the break have seen him shoot merely 9.1% from beyond the arc on 2.4 attempts a game.
There’s a lot of players who experience a slump sometime during a season. Their percentages dip and eventually go back up. However, to shoot less than 10% from 3-point range over a sizeable sample size of 9 games is atrocious.
The 2017 MVP isn’t a good 3-point shooter to begin with and the fact that he’s regressed to such a point in a part of the season that desperately needs the Lakers to play well is the exact opposite of what’s needed.
