What's the Deal With Buddy Hield?
The Sixers' newly acquired shooter has been up and down and maybe slightly back up again. Here's why the Buddy Hield experience has been a little more erratic so far than we might've hoped.
The Buddy Hield honeymoon was pretty nice, wasn’t it?
He came to the Sixers during the absolute darkest stretch of their season. Joel Embiid had just been diagnosed with his meniscus injury, Tyrese Maxey was in and out of the lineup, and the team was a dismal 1-8 in the previous nine games before the Bahamian sharpshooters’s debut.
Buddy instantly increased the watchability of the ailing Sixers, shooting 45.5% from three and averaging 19.3 points and 6.1 assists in his first six games with the team, all while getting up more than nine triples per game. For once, it appeared a shooting talent had landed in Philadelphia and not immediately lost his ability to properly hold a basketball.
As always, it was too good to be true.
In his last 19 games with the team, Hield is shooting 36.5% from three and averaging a mere 10.8 points per game, and he hasn’t recorded more than three assists in a game since March 12 — though those lesser raw numbers are largely attributable to the shrinking of his playing time. Buddy averaged more than 36 minutes a night during his first six games with the Sixers, but in the last 19 games, he’s down to just 24 minutes a contest.
What gives? How did the man who became only the fourth Sixers’ player to ever hit five threes and record 10 assists in the same game end up below Cam Payne in Nick Nurse’s pecking order just one month later? Well, it might have to do with him suffering in recent weeks from increased defensive scrutiny, decreased offensive opportunity, and a crippling lack of Joel Embiid.
First, though, we should address the most statistically sound (and lamest) answer to what’s wrong with Hield: basic regression to the mean. Buddy was never going to keep shooting that well, because he’s never shot that well before during his time in the NBA. He’s a 40.0% career three-point shooter, and though his 38.7% between both Indy and Philly this season is the second-lowest of any season in his career, it’s really not that steep of a drop-off from how he usually shoots. Even including his above-45% stretch in February with the Sixers, he’s shot right between 37.1% and 39.8% during each and every month this season.
Perhaps the story could end there: Buddy was shooting well, then he shot worse, and now he’ll probably shoot right around his average for the rest of the season. Makes sense, pretty simple.
But dissolving all of basketball down to shooting variance is both inadequate and lazy. There’s always more underneath the surface, and the same is true with Buddy Hield.
Remember the Seth Curry era in Philadelphia? He shot 42.6% from deep during his two seasons here, but was often asked by fans and writers alike why he seemed so hesitant to shoot. Despite his historic accuracy, he only attempted 5.2 threes per game with the Sixers, and most often they were shots where he was open enough to check the wind before his release.
Truth is, Curry himself probably wanted to attempt more threes. But it’s just really, really, really hard to get your shot off against NBA defenders, and Curry is 6-foot-1 with a slow, methodical release. He could never just fire away whenever the ball hits his hands, even if he had some breathing room. Chances were, a taller defender was ready to leap through the air and either knock the ball into the third row, or at the very least alter Curry’s eye contact with the rim as he released the shot.
Now apply the same to Buddy Hield, who at 6-foot-4 is a bit taller than Curry, and has a quicker release, but is still not some towering forward who can easily shoot over the hand of any defender. All the movement threes Buddy has attempted over the years were designed to help his team’s offense, but they also assist him in hunting out three-point looks that he can’t get by just spotting up behind the three-point arc. He’s not quite tall enough or quick enough to shoot without any concern for whoever is standing in front of him. Heck, it’s a huge compliment to Hield’s incredible accuracy that he is able to drain as many heavily contested threes as he does.
Even then, it helps when minuscule defenders like Darius Garland and Trae Young are the ones contesting.
When he first arrived in Philadelphia, I wrote about Hield’s counter to taller defenders running him off the three-point line — his lefty side-step dribble. It’s a decent counter, and one I much prefer to taking a dribble or two inside the arc for a long-two, as both Seth Curry and J.J. Redick used to do during their tenures with the Sixers.
However, NBA defenders are pretty smart. They’ve scouted Hield well, and opponents have become more and more prepared for Buddy’s side-step lefty dribble, and have altered their closeouts to counter it. Instead of simple fly-by closeouts to dissuade Hield from a catch-and-shoot, defenders will now specifically run at Hield’s right side to take away the shot, but keep their feet on the ground, anticipating that the Sixers’ shooter will instinctively attack to his left, and preparing themselves for a second contest on the jumper.
And unlike Buddy’s tenure with the Pacers, the current version of the Sixers have too many weak spots to help off of. Buddy drawing such aggressive detail and attention from defenders matters less when he isn’t surrounded by Myles Turner and Aaron Nesmith, players that defenses fear can torch them by either hitting multiple open threes or by finding the next open teammate. Mo Bamba’s percentage from deep looks great, and Kelly Oubre Jr. is capable enough to go off and hit six triples like he did in Toronto, but defenses aren’t scrambling in terror if one of those two is left open from three, and it’s more of the same for much of the supporting cast.
If bigger defenders are able to both take away Buddy’s catch-and-shoot looks and a good deal of his one-to-two-dribble pull-ups, things get real dicey, real fast. While not a bottom tier defender, Buddy is still a weak link on that end of the floor, and his rim finishing craft is too streaky to be reliable. Add it all up, and even with all the gravity he draws as a movement shooter, each Buddy game over the past two months becomes a binary where he either has it or he doesn’t. Same is true for guys like Payne, Tobias and Bamba, though none of them are the shooter that was promised like Buddy is. It’s why so many Sixers fans (rightfully) love Nico Batum and Kyle Lowry, the two role players who can have clear positive overall impacts even in games where they shoot 1-for-6.
Speaking of, Lowry is an important point in this discussion. His second game with the Sixers was the first in the 19-game stretch that’s been Buddy’s cool-down. At the same time Hield saw his minutes drop from about 36 to 24 each night, Lowry has averaged just under 30 minutes each game and started in each of the last 15 matchups he’s been available for. It’s clear who Nick Nurse prefers, and given his shared history with K-Low, it’s unsurprising. Nurse knows his team is undermanned and needs to scrap out wins by any means necessary. He knows Lowry and Hield are good at different things, and he’s determined that what Hield is good at (dynamic movement shooting) is less helpful than what Lowry is good at (being an evil basketball genius). Not to mention, the flashes Hield showed as a secondary handler and playmaker throughout his first few games in Philly are less needed with Lowry now in town.
Every aspect plays off of all the others. Buddy is getting fewer minutes, which means fewer actions are run specifically with him in mind throughout the game, which means fewer opportunities for him to show off his gravity, which means defenses can guard his more static actions in the same way… on and on we go. He’s a player that hasn’t been maximized during his time in Philadelphia, both due to some of his own shortcomings, and due to some of Nurse’s preferences.
But as Spike and Mike said through all of March, everyone just has to wait to see how Buddy will look once Embiid is back. Everyone remembers how good Redick and Curry looked running ball screens with him ad nauseam. Instead of just being stuck as the back screener in Spain/Stack pick and roll actions, Buddy can start flying off Iverson cuts into dribble handoffs with the reigning MVP drawing in the defense’s undivided attention at the nail. Or better yet, he actually can get standstill threes off while just spotting up behind the line whenever Embiid draws a double. The beauty of Embiid’s game is that he creates advantages for each of the other four players on his team at all times, and that advantage grows exponentially with the shooting ability of someone like Hield.
Overall, there were a lot of factors behind Buddy Hield’s March “slump,” in which he played more like a so-so backup than a deadly shooter who deserves a big contract this offseason. His percentage regressed toward his average, opponents got used to defending him within the Sixers’ offensive structure, and his margin for error decreased once Nurse found a replacement he liked better in Lowry.
But Buddy hasn’t hit the second-most threes of anyone in the NBA since 2016 for nothing. That deadly movement shooter that can terrorize defenses is still in there, as everyone was reminded of during his near-heroic performance against the Clippers, where he scored 17 and was a Kawhi Leonard and-one away from hitting the game-winning shot. With Joel Embiid set to either return against the Thunder in tonight’s game or Thursday’s clash with the Heat, my bet is that Buddy will start to look a whole lot more like the guy Sixers fans saw during his first six games with the team.
Buddy isn’t too different from the rest of us: He just needs for Joel to come back, and that’ll make everything better.
Daniel Olinger is a writer for the Rights To Ricky Sanchez, and author of “The Danny” column, even though he refuses to be called that in person. He can be followed on X @dan_olinger.
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