We’ve harped on, preached about, and cajoled to the masses Ricky Rubio’s one massive deficiency: Shooting the basketball.
That is a pretty big flaw when you’re a professional basketball player, but even those of us that have naysayed Rubio’s game from the start find this nugget from HoopsHype hard to believe.
According to the Pro Basketball website, Rubio is on pace to be the worst shooter, percentage-wise, in the history of the NBA.
HoopsHype doesn’t do a great job of qualifying that statement in their article linked above, so we looked into it, and that claim is one that is true, with an asterisk.
According to Pro Basketball Reference, a website that is never wrong, the worst field goal percentage in basketball history is Joe Fulks at just above 30 percent.
Aside from the humorous fact that Fulks is actually a Hall of Famer despite being the worst in history at such a major part of basketball, we think we know where HoopsHype is going with this.
Rubio is a 35.5 percent career shooter. Should he retire today, that would rank him as the eighth-worst shooter in pro basketball history.
Where the truth to HoopsHype’s claim comes in, is that all of those players that were worse shooters than Rubio were all born in or before 1934.
Because of rule changes, basketball becoming more of a big man’s game, and various other factors, shooting percentages were much lower until the mid-1960s.
All of the players that came out worse than current-day Rubio were either out of basketball by then or were past their prime and had already amassed most of their unbearable stats.
So if we were to venture a statement as to Rubio’s ineptitude from the field, we’d say that he is the worst shooter in the last 50 years of pro basketball, but not the worst ever.
We just wanted to clarify to be fair to Ricky and those that worked (or didn’t work, maybe that was the problem) extremely hard at being completely helpless when throwing a basketball towards a hoop.
Other Rubio nuggets in the growing local and national frustration that is his lack of jumper include MinnPost piling on Rubio for the Wolves fourth-quarter problems, FanSided running with HoopsHype’s claim of eye-wrenching shooting, and a Grantland shot chart of Rubio’s that shows, strangely, that he’s worse at shooting when he’s closer to the basket.
That’s more backwards than the Wolves passing on Stephen Curry for Rubio and Jonny Flynn, but that happened too, so maybe things are starting to make sense. In a backward way.
