I started to do a full mailbag and ended up going long on what's become the pressing question of the offseason since a certain video hit the interwebs:

Hey Ace,

That video of Hunter draining threes has been going around and I’ve played enough basketball to know the difference between a gym shoot around and a live game with a man in your face. Is there any reason (analytical or otherwise) to think Dickinson can add a three point shot to his game? He’s a decent FT shooter, but I’m not familiar enough with his high school career to know if this is a realistic hope or a fever dream. 

I mean, if he adds a deep threat to his game, that blows the ceiling off this offense... right?

Peter

The video in question, if you somehow haven't seen it yet:

Yeah it’s over for the rest of the country pic.twitter.com/FSwpOPxlGN

— Twill is a B1G Champ (@TwillSZN) April 20, 2021

Hunter Dickinson was highly ranked and reputed to have good touch out of high school, so it wasn't a huge surprise that he made 74% of his 111 free throw attempts as a freshman. It's still worth mentioning how rare it is for a big man to accomplish that: according to Bart Torvik's database, which dates back to 2008, he's one of only 18 freshmen listed at 6'11+ from high-major conferences to hit 70% or better from the line.

That list is packed with NBA players: DeAndre Ayton, Karl-Anthony Towns, Jaren Jackson Jr., Myles Turner, Lauri Markkanen, Cody Zeller, Greg Monroe, Jaxson Hayes, Jontay Porter, and Donté Greene among them. Towns, Jackson, Turner, Markkanen, and Green all became legit stretch bigs in the league.

[Hit THE JUMP for a deeper dive into that list, some recent Big Ten stretch big breakouts, and more.]

The National Precedent

We know Dickinson is in good company, but did that company hit threes in year two?

Seven of the 18 players on the aforementioned list were already attempting over five three-pointers per 100 possessions in their freshman seasons and five of those players made at least 34% of them. Of the other ten (removing Dickinson), seven went pro before developing a college three-point shot:

• Ayton was the #1 pick after his freshman year at Arizona. He went 12/35 on threes that season. While that portended him being a threat with the college line, he hasn't been one in the NBA, though he's a decent midrange shooter.
• Towns also went #1 after his lone college season. After going 2/8 in college, he was 30/88 (34%) in his rookie season, and in every year since he's attempted at least 275 threes while raising his career average to 40%.
• Hayes went in the lottery following his freshman year. He took the vast majority of his shots in the paint as a rookie but has developed a solid jumper in his second season, though he rarely takes threes.
• Zeke Nnaji shot 5/17 from downtown for Arizona last year before declaring. So far this season, the first-round pick is 20/53 (38%) off the bench for the Nuggets; he's actually taken 11 more threes than twos. (He's also now listed at 6'9, so his height was fudged a bit in college.)
• Cody Zeller stuck around for his sophomore season but went 0/2 from three. You may remember him being rather good for Indiana in 2013 anyway.
• Maryland's Diamond Stone went pro after one year and only appeared in seven NBA games. He added a functional, albeit streaky, three-point shot in the G League in his rookie year.
• Greg Monroe went 7/27 from downtown for Georgetown in his sophomore season despite massive overall shot volume, then was a lottery pick for the Pistons. He shot 1/17 on threes in his nine-year NBA career. 

The other three players—Carson Derosiers, Dallas Walton, and Ralph Sampson III—are the least successful of the bunch. The best season from beyond the arc any of them produced was Derosiers going 12/35 as a sophomore at Wake Forest.

It's worth noting that the players who didn't develop solid outside shots on this list came mostly from the early end of the time period we're examining: Monroe (freshman in 2009), Sampson (2009), Derosiers (2011), and Zeller (2012) played before skilled centers were expected to add a three-point shot to their arsenal. Walton (2018) and Hayes (2019) are the only two truly modern bigs on the list who didn't develop a three-pointer, give or take how you believe Ayton would've done with another year of the college arc.

The list is still a mixed bag for the possibility of Dickinson's three-point shooting developing within a season, but with some hopeful signs. By their second year out of high school, ten of the 17 other players on the list had at least a functional outside shot that either required the defense to stretch out or punished them for not doing so. A few of those players (Towns, Turner, Nnaji) became more dangerous outside shooters despite playing NBA competition with a longer three-point line. When you're this good, a big leap in one year is well within the realm of possibility.

The Dangers of Workout Highlights

If you're a Sixers fan, feel free to skip to the next section. In fact, I'm impressed you had the will to read this post in the first place.

Ever since going first overall in 2016 after one year at LSU, Ben Simmons has been a very good player who can't quite live up to his potential because he doesn't even attempt jump shots. This hasn't just been a limiting factor for Simmons but his team as well; the fit next to MVP-contending center Joel Embiid has been awkward because of the spacing issues that result from Simmons not presenting any outside shooting threat.

About once a year, though, we get a video of Simmons hitting a bunch of three-pointers in a workout. That video at the top of this section looks good, right? Well, it wasn't the first of its ilk, and yet Simmons didn't hit a three-pointer in his first two NBA seasons and has shot 5/34 from beyond the arc in 271 career games.

Simmons and Dickinson aren't a good one-to-one comparison, especially since Simmons is a sub-60% free throw shooter. He's still a good example of how workout videos must be taken with a huge grain of salt—he's not the only one whose workout videos haven't translated to games. It's one matter to hit shots in an empty gym and another entirely to make them in the flow of a game while defenders are closing in.

That's not to say the video of Dickinson is worthless. A few quick takeaways:

• While he's shooting on a court with a high school three-point line, he's taking them from beyond college range. If he's comfortable back there, the extra space increases the time he'll have to get his shot off. He's also shooting from the area a center will usually get their attempts out of pick-and-pop action.
• His release is relatively quick for a big man. He's not launching these at a casual pace, he's working up to in-game catch-and-fire speed.
• The overall form looks solid. With seven-footers, I'm mostly just looking to see that there isn't anything obviously unusual about their shot mechanics. Dickinson has good technique at the free throw line and his three-point form looks similar; you want to see consistency between those two shots.

The fact all three shots go in the basket is nice but also a handpicked sample of three. The form is more important for our purposes and it looks quite workable.

The Big Ten Examples

Teske's middling outside shot still helped M spread the floor [Campredon]

There have been a number of Big Ten big men to add the three-pointer to their repertoire partway through their college careers in recent seasons. I went back and found ten centers who went from very low-volume output to at least becoming a one-or-two-attempts-per-game outside threat. They include Dickinson's two immediate predecessors:

*at Drake

The shooting percentages run the gamut from sub-30% to the 40% range (Moe was awesome). Both Wagner and Teske attempting more three-pointers helped their team's offense improve from the previous season; even though Teske was a 30% shooter, defenses would still sometimes show respect for his shot, which was critical with a non-shooter in Zavier Simpson running the point.

The high-end outcome for Dickinson is probably in the Daniel Oturu/Thomas Bryant range: attempting a couple three-pointers a game and knocking down 35-38% of them. The low-end outcome is that he either doesn't take them or is in the Teske/Haarms Zone, where defenses are often better off letting him shoot threes and he does so anyway with the hope the shots eventually fall.

So... Is It Happening?

It makes a lot of sense for Dickinson to prioritize adding a three-point shot as brings in Moussa Diabate, who may also have a workable jumper but probably isn't going to hoist at high volume. There's a motivation for the team and also for himself; if Dickinson wants to improve his draft standing, there may be no better way than to show he can shoot from distance. Seeing the company he keeps at the charity stripe added to my optimism, too.

I'm still keeping my expectations tempered. Dickinson isn't going to transform into Moe Wagner, not that Michigan needs him to be that level of stretch big man—he's quite good in the post, after all. This is much more likely to only impact a handful of possessions per game.

That said, even if it's only an occasional threat, Dickinson adding the long ball would put defenses in a bind. Michigan has been on both sides of games in which a big man shot the defense out of its preferred pick-and-roll coverage with one or two early triples. Presenting the pick-and-pop as a viable option is half the battle—every added wrinkle is another one the defense has to keep in mind while guarding a well-constructed offense on the fly.

The pressing question is whether this is a one- or two-year project. This type of development takes time; Kyle Young's three-point breakout, for instance, happened in his fourth year. There's a chance Dickinson works on his shot and comes to the conclusion, perhaps with some advice from the coaches, that he's still a year away from getting the green light.

My assumption based on flimsy evidence is that Dickinson will start putting up the occasional pick-and-pop three in 2021-22. There's so much noise in the small sample sizes of centers shooting threes that a handful of shots can have an outsized impact on shooting percentage, but I'm guessing Juwan Howard would be quite happy if Dickinson could get up a couple threes a game at even a 32% clip. That's enough to make defenses think.