Some players should shoot the shot the defense wants

The mid-range pull-up out of a ball screen is a bad shot on average and a good shot for a small number of people.

Efficiency profiles flatten people. They tell you the long two is the worst shot in basketball, which is true across the population and quietly false for perhaps twenty players in the world, and the difference between those two statements decides several playoff series a year.

Here is the mechanism. A drop coverage exists to give you that shot. It concedes the pull-up from fifteen to eighteen feet in exchange for protecting the rim and staying attached to shooters. If you decline the offer, you have to beat a set defense with a pass into a tagged roller or a swing to a covered shooter, both of which are lower value than they look once the help has rotated on time.

So the question is not whether the pull-up is efficient in general. It is whether this particular player converts it well enough that the coverage stops being worth running. That threshold is lower than people assume, because the value of a made pull-up includes the coverage change it forces on the next possession, and that knock-on value never shows up in the shot's own expected points.

The strongest version of the objection is that a team full of players who take those shots will lose, and I agree. Scale matters. One elite pull-up shooter is a solvent. Three of them is a shot selection problem dressed up as confidence.

What frustrates me is how the argument gets conducted in public, where the same clip gets called a hero shot or a smart read depending on whether it went in. Both descriptions skip the actual question, which is what the defense was trying to buy and what price it was willing to pay.

There is also a game-state argument that gets ignored. In the last ninety seconds of a close game, the value of a shot includes how much clock it consumes and how likely it is to produce a rebound your opponent can run out on. A contested mid-range attempt with the offense loaded on the weak side scores well on both counts, which is part of why the shot everyone criticises keeps being taken by people who are not stupid.

Take the offer often enough that the offer gets withdrawn. Then stop.