(670 The Score) Amid their rise to the top of the Eastern Conference, the Bulls have been fueled by the NBA's best 3-point shooting percentage. Their 38.5% mark from long range is the best in the league entering play Friday.
The catch is the Bulls are also hoisting 3-pointers at an NBA-low rate – just 29.9 attempts per game. The Timberwolves lead the league in attempting 41.7 per game, and the NBA average is 35.5 per team.
Which begs the question – does coach Billy Donovan want his Bulls to shoot more 3-pointers? The answer is yes, but it's a more complicated matter in his mind than you might think.
"I'd like for us to take some more," Donovan said. "I think that would be good. But I also think too one of the areas we've got to get better at is, we've got to get better at playing downhill. And I think that when you get downhill and you force rotation, you force a second defender into the paint to help, that's when your spray-out threes really start to come. I don't love just saying randomly, 'Hey, we've got to take more threes.' Because I don't think that all threes are created equally. There's certain threes that are just bad in my opinion. You got to get the right ones. When we've shot really, really well, if you look at our team, we've shot well when the ball went into (Nikola Vucevic) and it's gotten sprayed back out and/or there's been something downhill and there's been rotation and the ball has gotten kicked out. But I think we can get more of those if we get more into those situations."
Donovan views an uptick in 3-point volume as one of the more attainable areas the Bulls (25-10) can improve upon internally. The Bulls are fourth in the NBA in offensive efficiency.
"That's one area offensively that we're going have to improve upon," he said. "Because if you look at – I know the stat sheet is a little bit different with the points in the paint, sometimes it doesn't tell the whole story. Just because you're in the paint doesn't mean it's necessarily a great shot. But I think when you look more at the analytics of rim attempts, shots inside the restricted area, we're a team that hasn't generated a lot of those. And we're going to have to be able to get downhill. So that's the one thing that's great for me. I'm not trying to be critical of our guys. I think you're always trying to look at ways to get better and to improve and to continue to evolve as a team and get better and put things on guys' brains. But I don't like necessarily like saying, 'Yeah, we've got to take more threes.' I think we need to get downhill more. Now, I think that gets you to the free-throw line. It opens up offensive rebounding and then it opens up opportunities to shoot more threes."
Cody Westerlund is a sports editor for 670TheScore.com and covers the Bulls. Follow him on Twitter @CodyWesterlund.
