Josh Smith’s shooting: fluke or new skill?

Josh Smith has shot better than 40 percent from deep for most of the season. (Layne Murdoch/NBAE via Getty Images)

Ric Bucher has a fun piece set to appear in the Feb. 7 issue of ESPN The Magazine (and available here for Insiders) on how veterans Richard Jefferson, Al Jefferson and Josh Smith managed to improve their strokes even after shooting one way for their entire NBA careers.

Smith attempted just seven three-pointers last season, a development most Hawks fans found pleasing because he entered 2009-2010 with a career three-point mark south of 28 percent. That’s awful. And his percentage on long two-pointers usually came in around 33 percent — below the league average.

The Atlanta forward kept taking long twos last season, but his abandonment of triples was a big reason why, by any measure, he had the best season of his career.

But that wasn’t good enough for Smith, Bucher tells us:

He thought abandoning the three to focus on shotblocking and rebounding would be his ticket to the 2010 All-Star Game. Instead, all he got was runner-up for Defensive Player of the Year and an uneven game. Enter Idan Ravin, the personal trainer known as the Hoops Whisperer for his unorthodox drills and positive reinforcement.

If you’ve read The Art of a Beautiful Game by Sports Illustrated‘s Chris Ballard — and if you’re a fan, you definitely should — you know Ravin is a serious dude. He’s trained a bunch of elite players — LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony and Chris Paul, among others — and he accepts no nonsense. He tells players what they’re bad at, and he devises creative and difficult drills to address those deficiencies. Here’s how Ravin went about fixing Smith’s jumper, according to Bucher:

Ravin … straightened out Smith’s lefty stroke so that the ball rises in a perfect vertical line instead of being brought over from the right side of his body. He also patched the hole in Smith’s psyche with texts containing affirmations such as “You don’t need their approval, so stop looking in their direction.”

And it appeared to have worked! Smith is shooting more long twos than ever before and more threes per game than in any season since 2006-07, and he’s making both shots at a career-best rate. He has been above 40 percent on three-pointers for most of this season, which is perhaps why we haven’t heard much lately about Hawks coach Larry Drew and Smith butting heads over long jumpers.

The question: Was it an early-season fluke, or has the seven-year veteran, 25, learned something?

If you’ve been watching the Hawks, you know Smith’s numbers over the last six weeks have come crashing down. In his last 16 games, he’s just 11-of-40 (27.5 percent) from three-point range. And those long twos? During his last 20 games — nearly half Atlanta’s season — Smith has hit just 23-of-74 jumpers from the area between 16 feet and the three-point line. That’s 31 percent — almost exactly Smith’s career rate from this range and well below his season-long rate of 39 percent.

That higher figure is obviously the result of some hot early-season shooting. It will be interesting to watch the rest of this season to see where Smith’s jump-shooting numbers settle. My money continues to be on numbers that look much like his career statistics.

This is not a knock on Ravin, by the way. By most accounts, he’s a fantastic teacher, and if Smith’s numbers don’t improve at all, it doesn’t mean Ravin did a poor job. It might mean that Smith isn’t following his technical advice anymore — and come to think of it, I wonder if Ravin has been watching Smith’s games — or it might mean that Smith just isn’t a very good jump shooter and won’t ever be one.

Fans tend to throw their hands in the air when players don’t improve. It’s their job! What else are they spending time on? And they get even more emboldened when Jason Kidd transforms himself into a top-shelf three-point shooter or Tyson Chandler suddenly starts hitting 80 percent from the foul line.

But maybe some guys, for whatever reason, just aren’t meant to be very good at particular things.