It doesn't take more than a few minutes of watching an NBA playoff game to realize how important outside shooting has become to the way the sport is evolving these days. Great shooters open the floor for their teammates to operate and make the offense flow much more smoothly. Still, ranking the best shooters in the NBA or this upcoming draft class is a highly subjective proposition.

Players who can sit in the corner and knock down open shots are valuable commodities in today's NBA, but without teammates who can actually create those looks, their value would be diminished because the defense would have no reason to actually leave them open. Every NBA game you watch is a chess match, a give and take of opposing strategies and decisions with adjustments made on the fly based on what coaching staffs and their trusted playmakers are seeing on the court.

The best creators in the NBA are not only great athletes who can get to the rim at will, but also are capable of pulling up off the dribble and punishing the defense. This is arguably a much more difficult and important skill to have – it's incredibly difficult to slow down a great off-the-dribble shooter who can create an open look in a flash.

With that said, how do we evaluate the best shooters available in this draft class? Here are some of the measures we came up with, with an explanation for why we isolated each stat, along with a look at the top-five players in the NBA and the 2015 NBA draft in each category.

This is not an exhaustive study including all of the best shooters in college basketball or even in the 2015 NBA draft class. The only players included in this subset are those deemed to "draftable" NBA prospects. For example, players like Connor Hill (6-3, SG, Idaho, 3.6 threes made per game, 45% 3P%), Lawrence Alexander (6-3, SG, North Dakota State, 3.3 threes made per game, 45% 3P%, Kevin Pangos (6-2, PG, Gonzaga, 2.2 threes made per game, 43% 3P%) were excluded, amongst others.



For the purpose of this article, we also honed in on only those who ranked well in the various categories we studied, which is why you won't see the likes of R.J. Hunter, Rashad Vaughn and to a lesser extent Cameron Payne, who weren't incredibly efficient this past season, but are still likely to get drafted in the first round in part because their potential as shooters.

Data Sources: Synergy Sports Technology, and DraftExpress Blue







3-pointers attempted per-40 minutes



Methodology: Anyone can go out and jack up 3-pointers without conscience, but if that strategy doesn't prove to be effective for winning games, there is little doubt that the player's teammates and coaching staff will quickly pivot away from it. Many of the players we'd consider to be the best shooters in the league are indeed those who heave up the most shots on a per-minute basis. Studies have shown that the volume of a player's attempts in college actually tell us more about what kind of shooter he will develop into than his actual accuracy, which can be swayed easily by the small sample size of the NCAA season. In parenthesis, you'll find the player's actual 3-point percentage this year.





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Tyler Harvey 9.8 (41%)

Michael Frazier 8.2 (38%)

D'Angelo Russell 7.6 (41%)

Mario Hezonja 7.4 (39%)

Corey Hawkins 7.4 (49%)



NBA leaders

Stephen Curry 10.1 (44%)

J.R. Smith 9.9 (39%)

C.J. Miles 9.5 (35%)

Louis Williams 8.9 (33%)

Wesley Matthews 8.8 (39%)





















