The Portland Trail Blazers view Shaedon Sharpe as a future All-Star level player, and for good reason. He's having an encouraging third season and is second on the team in scoring at 17.0 points per game despite being just 21 years old. While scoring is his calling card, Sharpe also contributes in other aspects with his athleticism, rebounding, and underrated playmaking. But if there's one area he can improve offensively, it's three-point shooting.
Shaedon Sharpe's three-point shooting is a hurdle to reaching his All-Star ceiling
Since entering the league in 2022, Sharpe's three-point shooting has been trending in the wrong direction. He shot a promising 36.0 percent as a rookie, but that has decreased to 33.3 last season and 28.2 this year.
There remains a possibility that Sharpe is closer to a league-average three-point shooter like his 2022-23 stats suggest. He played 80 games that year and has a smaller sample size the past two seasons after playing just 32 games in 2023-24 due to a core muscle injury.
But Sharpe is shooting just 25.4 percent from deep in Portland's last ten games. The Blazers desperately need an All-Star on their roster if they ever want to take that jump of being a team that can accelerate their rebuild. Sharpe is the best bet to become that eventually, but it will be much more challenging to reach that ceiling if he can't become a consistent three-point threat.
The Blazers invested top ten picks into three players the past three summers -- Sharpe, Scoot Henderson, and Donovan Clingan. There's been talk of Clingan eventually becoming a Brook Lopez-type player as an elite rim protector who can also stretch the floor on offense. To his credit, Clingan is a respectable 3-of-10 from three on the season. However, like Lopez, he may not fully unlock that aspect of his game until later in his career.
With Clingan seemingly entrenched as the Blazers' future starting center, their backcourt must be average three-point shooters, at the very least. The average three-point percentage is 35.2 for point guards and 36.8 for shooting guards. The guard most likely to fall short of these marks is the one the Blazers invested their highest draft capital in.
Blazers' future backcourt faces spacing challenges with Sharpe and Henderson
This year, Henderson is shooting better from beyond the arc than Sharpe but is still connecting at just a 28.8 percent clip. Scoot wasn't much better than that as a rookie, either, shooting 32.5 percent. The eye test and the fact that Sharpe has shot better in the past show that between the two, Sharpe is more likely to improve his percentage as the season progresses.
Three-point shooting has been a glaring issue for the Blazers ever since Damian Lillard was traded to Milwaukee. Last season, they finished dead last at 34.4 percent. This year, they are sixth-worst at 33.5 percent.
This problem could persist throughout the course of the Blazers' rebuild if Henderson and Sharpe don't get closer to the positional league average. That's especially concerning in the modern NBA, as the past four champions have all finished within the top five of three-point percentage.