Milwaukee Bucks: Ranking the 6 best shooters on the roster
If there’s one thing that holds especially true in the NBA today, it’s that you can never have enough shooting on your roster. The more good-to-great shooters you have, the more space is opened up in the paint for easy shots at the rim. This is even more important for the Milwaukee Bucks, who have arguably the best scorer at the rim in the entire league in Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Having great spacing is imperative for Antetokounmpo so the opposing team can’t throw multiple bodies at him on a drive and make things difficult for him. Thankfully, most of the Bucks roster can be relied upon to at least shoot league average from behind the arc. However, with the loss of arguably their best 3-point shooter in Bryn Forbes, there’s more importance on some of the role players to come in and hit shots.
The Bucks added a few guys who could help fill the void left by Forbes in addition to some players already on the roster. There are definitely going to be some good battles during the Bucks’ shooting competitions at pregame shootarounds and practices with the group of shooting the Bucks have assembled.
Some names will be left off this top six, but that isn’t to say they’re bad shooters, just that I want to see more from them, or they aren’t quite as good as the top names on the team. With that being said, let us rank the six best shooters on the 2021-22 Bucks.
Ranking the best shooters on the Milwaukee Bucks: No. 6 – Bobby Portis
It’s a bit odd to have a guy who shot 47 percent from deep last year as the sixth-best shooter on the roster, but here we are! The biggest thing for me with Bobby Portis is that I want to see him do it for a little longer.
Over his last four seasons, Portis has shot 39.1 percent on three attempts per game. It’s a strong sample, and it’s a good bet that Portis is officially a very good shooter, but I want to see him do it at a consistent rate. In that four-year sample, Portis’ 3-point percentages have gone 35.9 (2017-18), 39.3 (2018-19), 35.8 (2019-20), 47.1 (2020-21).
It’s a fluctuation from around league average to well above, but if he can get his floor to about 38 percent, then that would be a huge testament to the work Portis has put into becoming a 3-point threat. Keep in mind, Portis only took a total of 63 triples in two college seasons and 52 in his rookie year. It’s still a relatively new skill for him.
Ranking the best shooters on the Milwaukee Bucks: No. 5 – Grayson Allen
As one of our candidates to fill Forbes’ shooter role, Grayson Allen has the ability to really have an impact on the defending champs’ roster this season. While I’ve made the comparison to how similar his athletic profile is to Donte DiVincenzo and Pat Connaughton, Allen is easily the best shooter of the group.
Although his rookie season was a bit of a dip in his 3-point percentage (32.3 percent), the last two seasons are much more of what we expected of Allen coming out of college. Across 88 games, Allen has shot 39.5 percent on nearly five attempts per game. Going back to his time at Duke, Allen shot 38.2 percent (6.7 attempts per game) in his final three years.
He’s also developing a bit of a pull-up 3-point game, shooting over 35 percent on 1.7 attempts per game last season, per NBA.com/stats. It was the first season of Allen’s three-year career that he’s shot over one pull-up triple per game.