George Hill is thriving with the Milwaukee Bucks this season, and his current status as the league’s three-point leader tracks with his late career shooting growth.
After a tough spell of three-point shooting following his trad to the Milwaukee Bucks at around this time last year, George Hill was something of a revelation from deep in the playoffs.
Hill, at times, looked like the team’s second best player in the postseason, but it was his shooting that really acted as something of a pleasant surprise. Having shot just 28 percent from distance on 2.7 attempts per game over the course of 47 contests in the regular season, Hill made 41.7 percent of his 3.2 triples per game during Milwaukee’s playoff run.
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To those of a Bucks persuasion, that may not have been anticipated, but the truth is that it was actually Hill’s regular season shooting last year that was the real outlier in terms of his recent success rate from deep.
That bears further examination now as, 27 games through the current campaign, Hill stands proudly as the NBA’s leader in three-point percentage with a remarkable 51.2 percent success rate from distance.
The obvious question to come with a number quite as absurd as Hill’s current percentage is whether it’s even remotely sustainable, and if a regression is in fact just around the corner, just how significant can we expect it to be?
On that front, there’s certainly reason for optimism about how Hill’s incredible three-point shooting could hold up.
Prior to his regular season struggles in Milwaukee last year, Hill’s three-point percentages for his three previous seasons were 40.8 percent in 2015-16, 40.3 percent in 2016-17, and 41.5 percent in 2017-18.
Before the first of those three campaigns, Hill had never once averaged above 40 percent from deep for an entire season, in spite of coming as close as it gets to that mark (39.9 percent) in 2009-10 with the Spurs.
That points to something of an evolution in Hill’s career since he hit his late 20s and has subsequently crossed over into his 30s. A good shooter for the entirety of his career, Hill has evidently shifted his focus to beyond the arc in step with wider NBA trends, and is now looking like a notable beneficiary of that approach.
Hill’s current mark of above 50 percent is, of course, an entirely different proposition to the percentages he’s recorded in the past, but there’s certainly enough evidence of elite shooting in that above 40 percent run of seasons to believe it is something that he could feasibly have a chance of sustaining.
When Hill’s career is done, perhaps this year will be looked back on as a season where everything clicked, he hit top form with his shot, and found himself as a key part of a team that was perfectly suited to cater for his long-range shooting prowess.
As things stand, a drop-off may well come at some point from his currently almost impossible high, but it needn’t be feared. As a veteran, Hill has blossomed into one of the NBA’s very best three-point shooters, and his current success is very far from smoke and mirrors.