Analyzing the Intriguing Parallels in Tyrese Haliburton's and Trae Young's Unique Shot Selection
Examining Their Success with Wide-Open Pull-Up Triples
Tyrese Haliburton and Trae Young are two of the top and among many differences and similarities between them, they also have one unique parallel that sets them apart from any player in the last decade by a huge margin, and this post’s purpose will be to discover that parallel and try to find out how and why are they achieving such unique numbers.
Pull Up Jumpers
Trae and Hali are specific in a way that they take roughly 75%+ of their 3-point shots in the form of pull-up jumpers. They lead the league in that percentage along with Luka Dončić, who takes first place with over 80% of his 3-point attempts coming as a pull-up jumper.
On the x-axis of this chart, you can see the number of 3-point attempts per game for each player, while the y-axis tells us what their share of pull-up 3-point attempts out of total 3-point attempts (basically - the share of pull-ups vs catch and shoot situations, as those are the only categories).
Besides the aforementioned trio, no other player has a share of pull-ups above the 70% mark.
The lower left part of this chart is the pure C&S players (Markkanen, Strus, Murphy, Bogdanović&Bogdanović, Klay, …), and we have a unique and separate Curry Cluster, as Steph is all alone over at 11.5 3-point attempts per game while hovering around 55% share of pull up jumpers. He has hovered around that number throughout his career.
So at this point, you might be wondering why I haven’t included Dončić in the title. Because the uniqueness of Trae and Hali is visible in another dimension along with pull-up jumpers.
Wide Open Shots
The second dimension consists of wide-open shots, which generally become a rarity as a player is a better and more active shooter.
The x-axis on this chart shows the number of 3-pt attempts per game, while the y-axis now shows the share of wide-open 3-point shots out of all other types when it comes to closest defender metric:
very tightly defended (<2ft.)
tightly defended (2-4ft.)
open (4-6 ft.)
wide open (>6ft.)
As the number of 3-point attempts per game grows, the total share of wide-open shots falls significantly. That trend is even more visible if we instead take a look at the top 30 players in the total number of wide-open 3-point attempts per game.
We can see some new faces, but Steph, Hali, Trae, Lamelo Ball, and others are still present on this chart as well.
The Spearman coefficient of these data points is -0.71, which marks a significant negative correlation.
Putting It All Together - Wide Open Pull-Ups
Now that I’ve teased with these 3 charts, let’s try to put everything together.
This chart shows the number of wide-open pull-up 3-pointers per game through the season on the x-axis, while the y-axis represents the FG3% of those shots.
Trae and Hali shine in this aspect, boasting more wide-open pull-up 3-pointers than what many players achieve with any form of coverage this season. To put it into perspective, roughly 30 players attempt more pull-up 3-pointers per game than Halid and Trae do wide-open pull-up 3-pointers.
When we look at this aspect of the game and focus on the data from 2013-14 (when tracking data was started to get recorded) up until today, their performance is even more impressive, as these numbers are the best that have ever been recorded.
And along with that large volume of shots, they have been delivering with very efficient percentages for the past two seasons. The natural question arising now is how are they achieving that. Let’s take a look.
Pulling Up From Deep
Ever since Trae Young entered the league in 2018-19, he was among the top players when it comes to the average distance of his 3-point attempts.
This table shows top-15 players with the longest average distance of 3-pt attempts (not including backcourt shots). And in the table, we can see that this season is no different from the previous ones, as Trae is leading the league in average 3-point distance yet again. Trae is the biggest outlier on this list, he is shooting half a foot further than 2nd-placed Haliburton and almost 1 foot further than 13th-placed Luka Dončić.
Steph is 3rd, while Damian Lillard takes 4th spot this season, unlike the previous seasons where he was the one battling for the top spot with Trae.
Long Range Pull-Ups
We’ll try and focus only on long-distance pull-ups now. I must add that these 2 tables are generated from shot data instead of tracking data - shot data is annotated and collected by hand instead of automatically which means that it’s not as correct as tracking data. However, this is the only publicly available source of data available to us, so let’s give it a shot.
When we observe this data, we can see that Steph, Hali, and Trae are leading the pack in the longest average distance of those 3-point attempts. However, the difference is far smaller than in all 3-point attempts. Despite the longest average distance both of them boast a rather high percentage of pull-ups (similar relations of fg3% can be seen when observing the official tracking data on the NBA’s website). Before we continue, one scary thing to notice on the previous table is the ridiculous efficiency of rookie phenom Victor Wembanyama, but we’ll talk about him some other time.
Trae From Deep - Mini Video Session
Since this is Trae’s territory, let’s check how he gets wide-open pull-up looks from the deep.
Take a look from where Trae is pulling up here, his intention as soon as he crosses the court is to try to get one (actually two) of the defenders to slack off the screen and just pull up from way deeper than expected.
Trae is counting on opponents messing up the switch and even though Adebayo anticipated what was coming very early, Jaquez was stuck in the assignment. Trae immediately started to pull up from the logo.
Shooting Sooner Rather Than Later
The Pacers and the Hawks are 2nd/5th (respectively) in the league when it comes to pace. They’re both teams that like to take their shots fast, especially when their star players get in the open situations, even if they are far away from the hoop.
The Pacers’ blue bar in the previous chart (blue bar = early shots) is the longest among all of the teams, and they are the current season’s Run and Gun team, and they are amazing to watch overall. Pacers generally allow Hali to push the ball up the court during the early stages of the shot clock, and if he can’t find an early solution for one of his teammates (or he takes an early shot) then they try to hunt for mismatches.
Quick Release
When Haliburton does get a switch, he attacks it almost always by backing up and taking a non-contested step-back/pull-up/other jumper.
When it comes to shooting mechanics I think that Hali’s biggest weakness might be his biggest strength. He starts the release from a lower point if we compare him to some other shooters, and has a short and quick windup for his shot. All of that allows him to release the ball even before a player recovers.
Here is one instance where Hali puts OG Anunoby on skates, and even though Anunoby recovers quickly, the ball is already in the air and OG can only watch it go through the hoop.
One mechanical difference I noticed between Trae and Hali is that Haliburton never dips the ball when he goes into the shooting motion, meaning wherever he grabs it with both hands, the ball only starts to go up, unlike Trae (and many other shooters) who get that dip for extra windup.
Final Words
One of the factors that might have a huge influence on them being open, is their playmaking. They are leading the league in assists per game, and they are punishing every late switch/rotation that occurs on screens. When you send a double team to these two guys, they instantly know that someone is open, and their instinct changes from score to pass.
Tyrese and Trae are doing something that has genuinely never been seen until now. They’re somehow managing to generate wide-open pull-ups despite them already being considered top shooters among active players.
I hope this post also managed to show why and how are they achieving those numbers.