Minnesota Timberwolves: Towns ranked fourth-best shooting big of all-time

Minnesota Timberwolves superstar Karl-Anthony Towns was ranked the fourth-best shooting big of all-time.

Is Minnesota Timberwolves big man Karl-Anthony Towns really one of the five best shooting big men of all-time?

Admittedly, ranking current NBA players in context compared to past generations is becoming exceedingly difficult with the variance in the style of play from one era to the next.

But Bleacher Report’s Andy Bailey gave it a shot, and the results were somewhat surprising.

Minnesota Timberwolves: Towns ranked fourth-best shooting big man all-time

Clearly, today’s NBA features far more big men capable of shooting from long range than ever before; in the 1990’s, a “stretch big” was someone like Charles Barkley — or, for Timberwolves fans, Tom Gugliotta — shooting from long-two land.

Then, it progressed to exceptions to the big man rule like Raef LaFrentz, Arvydas Sabonis, and Mehmet Okur, to eventually more modern stretch-4s like Ryan Anderson and Kevin Love and, of course, Dirk Nowitzki.

Bailey’s methodology is as follows:

"First, we narrowed league history down to a sample group of players who are 6’9″ and up, played at least 60 percent of their career possessions as a power forward or center and launched at least 500 three-point attempts.From there, we calculated the points over average from the field (subtract the player’s effective field-goal percentage from the league average for the time and then multiply by the number of field-goal attempts) and the points over average from three (subtract the player’s three-point percentage from the league average for the time and then multiply by the number of three-point attempts) for each member of that group.Finally, we sorted each player in the group by the average of his rank in those two metrics."

This is generally a solid way to do it, but the main problem is that 500 attempts isn’t a super high threshold. While using “points over average” instead of shot attempts per game or something like that is smart, it lowers the bar far enough that there a handful of wacky results.

For instance, in Bailey’s “honorable mention” list of players ranked No. 11 through No. 20, names like Nemanja Bjelica and Terry Mills made the list, while you won’t find Kevin Love.

Sure, Love has only had two seasons during which he’s made more than 37.1 percent of his 3-point attempts, but a) he finished north of 41 percent in each of those campaigns, and b) his volume of 5.6 3-point attempts per game over the past 10 seasons of his career is much more significant than, say, Mills’ 3.3 attempts per game over his final seven seasons.

Bailey was clearly attempting to at least somewhat adjust for era by including league averages, and it mostly worked, although suggesting that Love isn’t in the top 20 shooting big men and Mills, Bjelica, and Meyers Leonard are … just doesn’t seem right.

At any rate, current Minnesota Timberwolves star Karl-Anthony Towns finished No. 4 on the list by way of his prowess for not just beyond the arc, but also in the paint and the mid-range. Remember, all three levels count as part of Bailey’s formula.

Here’s part of the write-up on Towns.

"Over the course of his career, Towns has averaged 1.4 threes and shot 39.6 percent from deep. But in this abbreviated season alone, his attempts have taken off. He averaged 3.3 makes on 7.9 shots from downtown per game in 2019-20.But as you’ll see is the case with our No. 1 on this list, Towns’ shooting goes beyond his prowess from three. Of his 5,741 career field-goal attempts, 43.8 percent have been two-pointers in the range of three feet from the rim out to the three-point line. He’s converted 46.2 percent of those attempts."

The only players to finish ahead of Towns? Steve Novak, Matt Bonner, and, of course, Nowitzki.

To be fair to Bailey, there is not a clear-cut way of defining “best shooting big men”, and his formula came about as close as you’ll find to one that addresses the crossover of eras, volume (at least to some extent), and shooting from both inside and outside the arc.

What’s indisputable is that Towns is already clearly a top-10 shooting big man of all-time, and, at least by this particular measure, he’s solidly in the top five, too.