One of the names conspicuously absent from the top 10 is Steve Kerr. He's first all-time in basic three-point percentage, but the lack of volume bumped him down to 14th on this list. There was a temptation to account for the change in three-point-attempt rate over the years, but rewarding those who've evolved with the game ultimately felt fine.
Here's some evidence for how rapidly and thoroughly things have changed: Buddy Hield, who has played just three NBA seasons, has already passed Jason Kapono's nine-year career and is closing in on Steve Novak, who operated as a marksman throughout his 11-year NBA tenure.
Other omissions who may trigger some reaction include Peja Stojakovic, Wesley Person, Dell Curry, Brent Barry and Mark Price, just to name a few.
In a lot of ways, those players laid the foundation for what we're seeing now. Since the three-point line's inception, individual players in each era have gently pushed the level of acceptable volume. From Craig Hodges in the 1980s to Reggie Miller in the 1990s to Stojakovic in the 2000s, we can thank the shooters of yesteryear for the beauty of today's game.
And finally, it's worth mentioning that the formula employed for this exercise does not account for degree of difficulty in any way.
Off-the-dribble threes are more common now than they were in Kerr's catch-and-shoot era, and Stephen Curry, among others, almost certainly deserves some bonus points for what he does. Kerr told ESPN's Tom Junod in May that the Golden State Warriors point guard is a new kind of weapon:
"My first year of coaching him, he's taking shots night after night that every coach I ever had would have called horrible shots. And they were horrible shots for every player in the history of the game until Steph Curry. And I realized before too long that Steph was going to take some crazy shots and they were going to look insane and I was going to feel silly for allowing my player to take shots like that and oh yeah, he's at about 45 percent from 3. So finally I just realized I had to get my old coaches out of my head, and this guy is a new deal who's different from anyone else who's played the game, and I have to not only allow what he does but accommodate it."
If this exercise were limited to just the last 15 years, we might have been able to evaluate the increased difficulty of Curry's attempts. We now have distances on all shots, information about the proximity of defenders, the number of pull-ups versus catch-and-shoots and more.
But since we're comparing across eras that have different amounts of information available, we'll stick to the more basic formula.
