Chicago Bulls center Nikola Vučević doesn’t need to be reminded about his shooting last season.
It’s hard to forget shooting 29.4% from behind the arc. At first, the whole thing seemed like an anomaly. Vučević was a career 34.8% shooter from behind the arc. Aside from one season in Orlando nearly a decade prior, his 3-point shooting had never dropped below 30% — and that was back when he was averaging 0.1 attempts per game.
For the first 15 games, Vučević tried to brush it off. The whole team was stuck in a shooting skid. Everything would sort itself out. He just needed to keep shooting. But 15 games stretched to 30. Vučević routinely air-balled shots. Thirty games turned into half of a season. His confidence was shot. And by the end of the worst 3-point shooting year of his career, Vučević still didn’t have a good explanation for what went wrong.
“That was just me having a bad year for no reason,” Vučević told the Tribune.
But this year, something is different. Again. Vučević rinsed out the sour taste of last season with a flurry of sharpshooting to start this year, going 14-for-28 (50%) from behind the arc despite taking more attempts (4.7 average) than any other season in Chicago.
Vučević still isn’t sure why he struggled last season — but he thinks he knows why this year is going so much better. A combination of resetting his mentality, slowing down his shot and adjusting to a new system designed to create a high volume of 3-pointers has the center feeling himself behind the arc once again.
“Last year was just me overthinking it a lot at one point, because I just — I didn’t shoot it well,” Vučević said. “I was just trying to dig out of it. This is a new year for me and hopefully it will continue to do well.”
Vučević wasn’t always a 3-point shooter. He averaged 0.1 attempts from behind the arc in his first four seasons in the NBA. But as his role adapted in Orlando, Vučević embraced the importance of building out his long-range shooting to complete his transformation into an inside-out stretch center.
In the 2015-16 season, Vučević averaged 22.2% shooting from behind the arc on 0.1 attempts per game. He embraced this weakness head-on that summer, increasing his 3-point reps while playing international ball with Montenegro.
The next season, he averaged 30.7% on one attempt per game. The season after that, he averaged 31.4% on 3.6 attempts per game. This significant progression over two years finally laid the foundation for the first elite 3-point shooting stretch of Vučević’s career in the 2018-19 season, when he averaged 36.4% on 2.9 attempts per game on the way to his first All-Star selection.
In the nine seasons since making that initial leap, 3-point shooting has been an integral piece of the center’s game. But in Chicago, it’s also been a source of frustration.
In his first two seasons in Chicago, Vučević felt his role behind the arc was somewhat overemphasized, with schemes aimed to set him up for 3s ultimately getting him stuck in the corners of the court where he couldn’t holistically impact the offense. And even as Vučević continued to sink 3s, he felt underutilized in this lopsided version of his offensive role.
Coach Billy Donovan worked to reshape this role last season, giving Vučević more responsibility at the nail and funneling his 3-point opportunities through pick-and-pop scenarios. But it wasn’t until this year — when the Bulls adopted a high-paced offense that moved away from the midrange-heavy style impacted by DeMar DeRozan’s tenure with the team — that Vučević felt he found his groove again.
“Our emphasis this year is really to get to the paint and create out of that,” Vučević said. “We talked about it after September and throughout camp. We work on it every day and little by little, the more we work on it, the more it’s going to become a habit.”
Spent some time today digging into Nikola Vučević’s leap (and prior drop-off) in 3-point shooting from 2022 to now.
Think it’s notable that a bulk of Vučević’s shots threes come from the top of the arc early in the shot clock, often on the very first action of a play. pic.twitter.com/Y3njAH0uCD
— Julia Poe (@byjuliapoe) November 4, 2024
This new high-volume shooting system gives the Bulls the freedom and confidence to rip off 3-point attempts at any moment in the clock. This has a bolstering effect for Vučević, who is often given space at the top of the arc in the opening 10 seconds of the shot clock. The Bulls also help to widen this space by using a guard like Zach LaVine to set an initial off-ball screen to pin the opposing big into the paint, which gives Vučević an early window to either take a shot behind the arc or initiate the opening pass of the ensuing action.
In their new small-ball approach, the Bulls are also playing more five-out basketball with the big (typically Vučević, but also Jalen Smith and Patrick Williams) behind the arc. This gives Vučević better spacing to position himself for catch-and-shoot 3s without feeling that he’s getting lost outside the action. Vučević feels these shots are more natural — and thus more effective.
“I think that’s just the case for any player,” Vučević said. “When your shots come out of the flow of the game where you kind of expect it, you can get yourself ready, get into position and really take your time to shoot it.”
There is one consequence to this early improvement — the shots are only going to get harder for Vučević. While much of the space created for his 3-pointers this year is a byproduct of spacing and ball movement, it’s also clear that opponents are sagging heavily off the center when he gets the ball behind the perimeter, likely as a calculated decision based on scouting last year’s inefficiency.
That scouting will change as Vučević keeps knocking down shots. But when the defenders begin to crash him harder, the center is committed to maintaining the same approach that is fueling success when he’s left wide open.
“I felt like a lot of my shots last year, I was rushing it a little bit and I wasn’t staying in them,” Vučević said. “That’s really what I tried to work on this year — just staying in my shot, taking my time. Don’t rush it. Trust it.”
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