I guess we should exclude big men from the past (modern day big men can shoot) because in the past, big men weren’t expected to shoot they were expected to dominate in the paint and the post.
For perimeter players then the further back you go the more bad shooters you will find. Bob Cousy who won MVP and was one of the best players of his era – was a horrible shooter. John Havlicek and Elgin Baylor weren’t great shooters both were inefficient. Rick Barry wasn’t terribly efficient either – although he made it up by being an above average distance shooter for his era and his great free throw shooting. Oscar Robertson and Walt Frazier weren’t really shooters either. Despite his name – Pistol Pete Maravich wasn’t that efficient.
Some of the biggest stars from the 80s – Dr J wasn’t a great shooter and neither was Magic Johnson. Dennis Johnson was notably a bad shooter and even got made fun of it by Bird and other teammates. In fact I would say up until recently the last decade being a great shooter was kind of a rare thing.
Iverson, Kobe, Tmac, Wade none of these guys were great shooters. Kobe was probably the most ‘ok’ out of them but he’s not a great distance shooter by any metric today. Lebron wasn’t great – he’s improved since then but he was really rough at the beginning of his career. Russell Westbrook is kind of a throwback to earlier guys like Iverson in that he didn’t care about his efficiency he was all heart.
These days though it’s getting rarer to find a star that can’t shoot well. Ben Simmons was criticized alot for not being able to shoot. Shooting is pretty essential in the modern day NBA. These days you won’t be able to win unless you or several of your teammates are good shooters. Jayson Tatum won his championship shooting pretty much like Kobe did in the Finals but I would say that’s more of an exception than the norm now.
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