Evan Turner Improved His Three-Point Shooting By Not Practicing Threes

You see, kids: Allen Iverson was right all along. Practice is overrated at times. Just ask Evan Turner, who has doubled his three-point shooting accuracy this season from last year (a career-best 44.4% up from last season’s 22.4% showing), by not practicing his long-distance shooting. Per CSN Philly: “His secret? ‘Not working so hard on it,’ he said before scoring 26 points in last Friday’s 95-94 victory over Boston, including the winning basket with 3.9 seconds left in overtime. Come again? ‘I stopped focusing on it,’ he said. ‘That was it. I stopped focusing on it. I worry about my mid-range [game], my driving and my free throws, and that’s it. Honestly, I don’t shoot threes before games. I don’t practice threes anymore.’ Turner has already made more three-pointers (16) than he did in either of his first two seasons. And he has done that in 36 attempts, a 44.4-percent success rate that ties him for 15th in the league. He shot 22.4 percent (11 for 49) last year, 31.8 percent (14 for 44) as a rookie. To hear him tell it, he did try to work on his three-point shooting over the summer. ‘But,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t hitting them. After a while you say, ‘Never mind.’ I just kept working on my mid-range game. I think the more important thing is just to be in a good rhythm.’ He shoots them almost exclusively from the corners, the shortest of the three-point shots. It is, he said, what the defense is giving him – and but a few feet from the spots on the baseline where he prefers to launch his jumper.”