Explaining why Domantas Sabonis is still not a true stretch five

Sacramento Kings All-NBA center Domantas Sabonis has been off to a historically great start to the 2024-25 regular season. Most of it has come from the stuff we've grown accustom to with Sabonis – interior bully ball and brilliant passing.

However, a newer development for Sabonis is the way he is shooting the three ball. So far, Sabonis is hitting 54.5% on his 2.8 threes per game. Obviously, his perimeter shots won't keep falling at that high of a rate. But is Sabonis a legitimate stretch big man now?

What it takes to be a stretch big man

As you can probably guess from the headline of this post, our answer to the previous question is "no." Why, you may ask? Well, to be considered a player that teams respect from beyond the arc, you need to be accurate (efficiency) and be able to launch a ton of threes (volume).

Sabonis is continuously working on his accuracy as a jump shooter. After shooting 31.2% from three in 2021-22, Sabonis returned as a 37.3% shooter in 2022-23, then a 37.9% shooter last season. Now, he's hitting over half of the threes he takes! Clearly, he meets the first element necessary to be a stretch five.

The problem is that he can't take a high volume of threes. Despite all his success from downtown, Sabonis is only in the 15th percentile in 3-point attempts per 75 possessions (per Dunks & Threes). No matter how accurate you are as a shooter, no defense will change the way they defend you for one or two shots per game.

We know what you're thinking. Why doesn't Sabonis just take more threes?

The answer to that is very simple: he can't. Sabonis' 3-pointers are going in, but it takes him a relatively long time to execute his shooting motion. Here is an example of this phenomenon in the clip below:

To get his shot off, Sabonis needs a good bit of room to operate (like in the clip above). Relying on these types of situations in order to take a three puts a ceiling on how many attempts you can handle during the course of a game/season.

The other wrinkle to this is if you have a slow release, teams will always naturally sag off you to a degree because they know they will have time to closeout to you when the ball comes to you (if they respect your ability as a shooter). The whole point of being a stretch big is that you bring defenders up to the perimeter, so you are basically eliminated from this conversation when your release is too slow to do that.

Back to Sabonis, he is a great player. However, he isn't a stretch big man, and he won't be until he is able to speed up his release and still maintain good efficiency. We still love him, though.