Courtney Lee is yelling at me.
“Whatchu mean, unorthodox!?” he says loudly, tilting his head and lightly slapping the notebook that I’ve jotted down my half-dozen questions on. “Whatchu mean!?” he repeats. I had just asked him about his jump shot – specifically, how he has played an entire career as an elite 3-point shooter even though his jumper looks like he’s doing the Whoa Dance as he brings the ball above his head, where he coils and snaps his wrist ahead of him with the ball soaring towards the hoop. To be more diplomatic, I had called it “unorthodox.” I’ve been around long enough to know some players are hyper-sensitive to any sort of criticism. Shawn Marion, for example, won’t even entertain questions about his own shooting form. But Courtney, from my interactions with him this season, is more chill. That’s what I thought, anyway. I was quickly beginning to wonder if I was all wrong.
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Then Lee laughs. He’s screwing with me. “Nah, man, it’s all good,” he says with a goofy smile, as if to say,Oh, man, I had you going for a second. And then he explains the very real reason why his jumper ended up the way it did. Turns out, it’s more interesting than I had even realized.
During July 2012, Lee was traded to the Boston Celtics. Only 26, it was already the third trade of his career, sending him into his fifth professional season on his fourth team. During training camp or preseason, Lee recalls, he suffered a friendly-fire injury from the late Fab Melo, who “messed (his) leg up.” It was a deep thigh contusion, and Lee underwent a procedure after the blood in his bones started calcifying, something that can happen when the body suffers severe tissue damage. While he started the season and played 78 games, the procedure left him without strength in his right leg while shooting. What was once an orthodox jump shot turned into, by necessity, something different.
Kenny Graves still remembers the late nights he spent with Lee reworking his jump shot into what it is today. Graves, now the Celtics’ director of player development, was splitting time between the video room and on-court coaching. “A lot of form shooting,” he recalls now, “just to get his mechanics back in order.” As a right-handed shooter, Lee was trying to replace the power that his right leg – his dominant one – was generating for his shot. “If you look now, my right leg goes in, and I bring my ball over here,” says Lee, gesturing in the general proximity of his face as he talks with me. “For like two years, I had no strength in my leg when I was shooting,” he says. “I had to compensate this way, and it just became a habit because I did it for two years. So it just changed my whole shot.”
Lee shot 40.1 percent on 3s throughout his four-year collegiate career at Western Kentucky and then 38.6 percent during the first four years of his career. He still swayed forward on his shot, just like he does now, but there wasn’t the same amount of movement across his body, just like he said. “He basically already had his shooting form (then),” Graves says. Here, in the uncomfortably grainy quality that most pre-2012 footage seems to have, is what it looked like.
In that 2012-13 season, the rate of his 3s fell from 3.8 per 36 minutes to 2.9 per 36, but his percentage hardly wavered, only slipping to 37.2 percent. He’s shot 39 percent ever since. He’s accomplished all that even with the unorthodoxy of his jumper now, which you can see up close in this video. (It shows real footage, despite what it looks like.)
This past season was his worst as a shooter, the only campaign in which he has shot worse than 30 percent. But Lee was once again recovering from injury, dealing with nerve damage in his neck while also playing inconsistently in New York and Dallas. “I sat on the sideline for five months and then when I did come back I was out of (the rotation),” he says. “I had no feeling in my fingers for a while. I had to teach myself to shoot all over again.”
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As Seth Curry says, “It’s not the prettiest thing or something you wanna teach.” But that jump shot has made the basketball go in the basket for years now at a high level. “He finishes it the same way over and over,” Curry says. “If that’s what’s comfortable to you, that’s what works.”
Both Curry and Lee only talked about confidence and repetition when asked what the key to shooting was. Sure, they’ll talk a little bit about the details, talk about the 1-2 step vs. the hop, talk about whether they look at the ball or at the rim. Lee, for example, uses the hop – where you catch the ball while hopping into position to rise and shoot – in the corners to make sure he doesn’t step backwards out of bounds. Curry, smiling, talked about how his dad always taught him to look at the rim – even though his brother, it turns out, is a ball watcher when he releases his jumpers. (The Seth-ier of the Curry brothers just passed Steph in all-time 3-point percentage, so maybe he’s right.) But none of that matters without confidence, without millions of jumpers taken, without feeling comfortable with the shooting form you have every time you use it in a game.
That’s why Lee’s shot, unorthodox or not, works.
Photo by Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports
