Move over Splash Bros: Cavs are best shooting team in the league

Cavs are best shooting team in the league: League-leading accuracy

The bedrock for building a team that excels at shooting is to build an offense that generates 3-point attempts. Only shooting when you are wide open can artificially boost your 3-point percentage but it doesn’t mean much in today’s game. To excel at shooting in a way that opens up the paint, you have to put willing shooters on the court and then run actions to free them up for shots.

Yet leading the league in 3-point shots also doesn’t mean anything if you aren’t knocking them down, too. To be a genuinely great shooting team, volume and accuracy must be wedded together. This year’s Cavs? Well, they’re genuinely great.

The Cavs are shooting a league-leading 42.7 percent on 3-pointers, which leads the league and by a significant margin. The 2nd-place New Orleans Pelicans are second at 40 percent, closer to Charlotte in 11th than to the Cavs. It’s early, certainly, but the Cavs are on fire from deep.

When you factor in that they are 11th in 3-point attempt rate (percentage of their shots that come from deep) that has led to the third-most made 3-pointers per game, behind only the Indiana Pacers and Boston Celtics. Who would have thought the team starting Jarrett Allen and Evan Mobley would be leading the league in sharpshooting?