Was Ben Simmons a Shooter in High School?

Ben Simmons didn’t take all that many jump shots as a college freshman, but did he do so more when he was in high school?

No NBA Draft prospect is perfect, and the same is true for LSU freshman Ben Simmons, who is projected to go first overall and end up on the Philadelphia 76ers. After his first and only season at LSU, most were left impressed, but many have one bad thing to say about him — he doesn’t have much of a shooting game from beyond five feet.

I’ve talked about how this isn’t that big of an issue. Simmons is young, has time to work it out, and can do everything but shoot (handle the ball, move off the ball, and pass) from outside the five-foot radius of the rim. Still, I do agree that he should spend some time fine-tuning his shooting motion and getting that shot down before next season begins, and continue working on it throughout next year.

I’ve also been growing curious about Simmons and his high school days. Simmons went to high school in Australia, where he grew up. I wanted to know if Simmons utilized his jump shot in high school more often than he did in college. I was left, at the very least, intrigued by the results of my research.

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Max Preps, the largest site for statistics on high school basketball, logged 29 games of Simmons’ high school career. In those games, Simmons averaged 27.5 points, 11.5 rebounds, 3.9 assists, 2.5 steals, and 1.4 blocks per game, very similar to his freshman year stats. Ben was far above the national average in every single category as a high schooler, shown in the bar graphs on the front page of his Max Preps profile.

For the purposes of the rest of this article, I’m only going to be considering his shooting stats from his senior year, since that is the most important. His junior year is seemingly incomplete, but some stats are available on the Max Preps page.

Simmons shot 66 percent from the field in his senior year of high school, and 29 percent from beyond the 3-point line. His true shooting percentage in his senior year (which takes into account the value of shots as well as free-throws) was 69.6 percent, which is a decent true shooting percentage.

In his freshman year at LSU, Simmons had similar numbers, finishing with a 3-point shooting percentage of 33.3 percent after attempting just three 3-pointers all season. In his senior year, he did attempt 51 3-pointers, which gives us a larger sample size.

What must be considered, however, is the fact that the 3-point line is adjusted at different distances for each level of play. In high school, the radius from the rim to the 3-point line is just below 20 feet. In men’s NCAA basetkball, the 3-point line is extended by one foot, at 20 feet, 9 inches. The real challenge begins in the NBA, where the radius extends all the way to 23 feet, 9 inches.

So, since Simmons hit 29 percent of his attempted shots from the 3-point line in high school, we can assume that Simmons could hit a fair amount of his long 2-point shots in the NBA (since 20-23 feet would be a very long 2-pointer in the NBA) and a decent amount of mid-range shots. There is the variable of improved defense in the NBA, but given that Simmons should have been practicing that shot all along, I feel as if the percentages should stay at about the same level of success in-game.

Next: Draft Analysis: Jamal Murray

What I think this shows is that we have latched onto the narrative that Ben Simmons is a bad shooter, and can never be a good (or even mediocre) one. In trying to find a flaw with Simmons, we found one, and have exaggerated it to the maximum.

Does Simmons need to work on his jump shot? Absolutely. But that’s not a reason to not take him first overall.