One of the major talking points of the summer in NBA circles this offseason has been the place of analytics in basketball. The darn things recently cost two youngsters a crap ton of money, forced a superstar out of his perceived forever home, and, recently, a beloved NBA legend and member of the league’s 75th Anniversary Team revealed that this advancement in the game tried to mitigate his signature shot.

In case you don’t know what I’m referencing, here is the clip that his been circulating through X  from a recent conversation Carmelo Anthony had with Dwyane Wade:

“They tell me, no mid-range shots. Coach ain’t talking to me. What? You brought me here for what? They ain’t talking to me, they talking to somebody else. I’m looking at [Chris Paul] behind me on the chair like, ‘See what I’m saying?’ Leave it alone. Oh, they broke it down. Numbers. We only allowed 17 mid-range shots a game. Here’s who can take them. Broke it down, [Paul] can take the majority of the mid-range shots. James [Harden] can take, [Anthony], you get maybe one. Maybe one? I had 25,000 points from mid-range. Tell me I only could take one mid-range a game, but you want me to shoot 12 threes?”

For those of you who are newer to the game or have forgotten about the intricacies of Anthony’s scoring package, from his third season (2005-06) until 2018, he never took less than 46% of his overall field goal attempts from the midrange (per Cleaning the Glass). During that stretch, he averaged over 22 PPG in every season except the last one. So, it seems like he’s got a point, right? Why would you not want Anthony taking the shot that he’s most comfortable with?

The Truth About Carmelo Anthony

Before we get into the Anthony of this all, we need to debunk what analytics have actually done to midrange jumpers. In his book, “The Midrange Theory,” Seth Partnow actually has a wonderful chapter about, well, midrangers. He explains that analytics haven’t eliminated midrange jumpers. Rather, they have omitted catch-and-shoot midrange shots and consolidated their usage to self-generated shots that are taken by the best marksmen from this area on the floor. So, to take midrange shots in the modern era, you need two things: 1) to be able to create them on your own, and 2) to convert on them efficiently.

The Houston Rockets with Daryl Morey and Mike D’Antoni were at the forefront of this movement, and a big reason for their success in the late 2010s was based on how well they maximized their shot chart.

Every great team needs one or two guys who can take this shot because, in the postseason, defenses are much more formidable and capable of limiting threes and layups (the preferred shots from an efficiency standpoint). The Rockets already had two players capable of doing that in the aforementioned Paul and Harden duo. In 2018-19, Paul was in the 85th percentile in all midrange shots, while Harden was in the 78th percentile. They had their midrange bucket-getters, and that is part of the reason that they preferred Anthony’s shots to come primarily from the 3-point line (so he could capitalize on the advantages they were creating for him).

The other piece of the puzzle here is that you can only have so many creators on the floor before you have a redundancy. Basketball is a game of balance. You need some guys who can create, some guys who can space, some guys who can defend, some guys who can finish plays around the rim, etc.

Both Paul and Harden were better 3-point shooters than Anthony. So, one could argue that Anthony should be the one doing the creating while the other two space for him. But the thing is that both of those guys were better offensive players than him, so it wouldn’t make sense to waste their talents by relegating them to a pure spacer role.

Anthony’s best offensive season saw him post an Offensive Estimated Plus-Minus of +4.5 (per Dunks & Threes). That was good enough to place him in the 99th percentile in 2012-13. Pretty good; however, Paul had nine seasons with a higher mark than this, and Harden has seven. All due respect to Anthony (who, by the way, was a super-efficient midrange player at his peak), but he just wasn’t as good of an offensive player as Paul or Harden, especially in the diminished state the Rockets got him at (it was his age-34 season).

If Anthony was ever going to succeed with the Rockets, he had to embrace a role as a volume spot-up 3-point shooter. Something he just wasn’t willing to do, as evidenced by the disdain in his voice from the clip above. Funny enough, though, he did end up figuring out how to do this in his last two seasons in the league.

It sucks that Anthony was not able to age as gracefully as a lot of the legends we are seeing today (LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Harden, etc.). But it isn’t because the Rockets or analytics did him dirty; the game just passed him by.